Last month we expanded our look at managed futures mutual funds to look at all of the new entrants into the space, not just the normal whipping boys Rydex and Wisdom Tree. As we have discussed before, our main problem with those two products is that they are being marketed as managed futures exposure without containing any actual managed futures exposure. Enter: several products which actually do invest in underlying managed futures managers (kudos to you), but do so at a very high cost with extra layers of fees and, more often than not, a high front end sales (load) fee (shame on you). And then there are a bunch which are not giving exposure and charging the load fees, the worst of the worst.
Given all of this, we don’t think mutual funds are a good vehicle to access the asset class if you have the capital to stand on your own and invest in individually managed accounts. What is the end result of these products not giving actual exposure to the asset class and charging high fees? Significant underperformance compared to the benchmarks. Read ‘em and weep below (Disclamer: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results).
4/17/2012 Edit: categories rearranged.