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Mark Hulbert
July 16, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EDT · Recommend (1) · Post:
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Consumer sentiment's mysterious free fall
By Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch
ANNANDALE, Va. (MarketWatch) -- I have both good and not-so-good news to report after reviewing the advisers with the best long-term records.
First the good news: These advisers on balance do not believe that a major stock bear market is in store.
The not-as-good news: They are not betting very heavily on a strong bull market in stocks either.
I reached these conclusions upon compiling a list of the mutual funds that are most recommended by the advisers who have beaten a buy-and-hold in the stock market over the last 15 years. I chose such a long period because I wanted a time frame over which the stock market's performance was neither well below nor well above its long-term historical average. My hope was that I would thereby eliminate both perma-bears and perma-bulls from the group of market beaters.
A total of 31 advisory services were able to jump over the hurdle I had placed, and here are the mutual funds that are recommended by at least three of them right now -- listed in descending order of popularity.
Notice that the two funds that are at the top of this list are a gold fund and a bond fund, and that the next two most-popular include another bond fund and an international stock fund. The top four slots do not include any U.S. equity funds, in other words.
And of the remaining nine funds on the list, just four focus on the domestic equity market.
All in all, hardly a ringing endorsement for the notion that the stock market is going to skyrocket anytime soon. Yet, at the same time, we must note carefully that none of these most-recommended funds involves a bet that the stock market will decline.
If I were to try to distill a strategy from this list of the top performers' top funds, it would be to give the stock market the benefit of the doubt -- but only within the context of a very well-diversified portfolio.
Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial Digest in Annandale, Va. He has been tracking the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters since 1980.
Mark Hulbert is editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest, which since 1980 has been tracking the performance of hundreds of investment advisors. The HFD became a service of MarketWatch in April 2002. In addition to being a Senior Columnist for MarketWatch, Hulbert writes a monthly column for Barron's.com and a column on investment strategies for the Journal of the American Association of Individual Investors. A frequent guest on television and radio shows, you may have seen Hulbert on CNBC, Wall Street Week, or ABC's World News This Morning. Most recently, Dow Jones and MarketWatch launched a new weekly newsletter based on Hulbert's research, entitled Hulbert on Markets: What's Working Now.
It's no secret that Americans are depressed. But the deep dive in consumer sentiment seems to come out of nowhere, writes Rex Nutting.
35 min ago12:07 p.m. July 16, 2010 | Comments: 74
- theaccusersgift | 11:13 p.m. July 15, 2010
"Mark Hulbert: Top performers and their top funds http://on.mktw.net/atehX1" 11:23 p.m. EDT, July 15, 2010 from MktwHulbert
"Mark Hulbert: Market gain suggests rally has legs http://on.mktw.net/9tolgQ" 11:22 p.m. EDT, July 13, 2010 from MktwHulbert
"Mark Hulbert: Sentiment barely budged last week http://on.mktw.net/bFeW7m" 11:55 p.m. EDT, July 12, 2010 from MktwHulbert
"Mark Hulbert: Track record of the death cross http://on.mktw.net/9OEMi8" 11:32 p.m. EDT, July 8, 2010 from MktwHulbert
"Mark Hulbert: Outlook for euro and dollar has changed http://on.mktw.net/dyS9Si" 11:41 p.m. EDT, July 6, 2010 from MktwHulbert
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