In this week’s Wealth Matters column, Paul Sullivan writes about an analysis of over two decades of data on the performance of some 300 mutual funds. The idea was to determine which funds outperformed a benchmark — in this case, the Vanguard S.P. 500 Index Fund — over that time.

What the analysis showed was that the best-performing funds were not necessarily the ones with the lowest fees, the ones run by the best-known managers or the ones focused on any particular strategy. Instead, the funds that focused on small- and midcapitalization stocks (generally defined as companies with market capitalizations of $300 million to $10 billion) performed the best over this period.

While some mutual fund managers may complain about measuring their funds’ performance against the S.P. 500 Index, most investors, for better or worse, gauge their returns and overall financial well-being against one of the major indexes. After all, they care less about how their money is growing and more about whether it is growing.

The firm that ran the study, DAL Investments, uses data like this for its own unique investing style. Its “upgrading” strategy is meant to identify trends early and invest in those funds, regardless of what those trends are.

What is your investing strategy?

Below are the 20 funds that performed best in the analysis. But, as the fund managers themselves would say, past performance is no indication of future returns.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9cc3e741bcd966292387ae44d6803a6b