Russell Kinnel Quotations

No one would accuse Lange as a closet indexer. He's done an awesome job at Capital Appreciation.

He's a very sharp guy who did a really good job at Mutual Series. They got points for not giving up on their strategy during the growth boom and tossing aside dividends and balance sheet analysis.

He certainly deserves points for doing so well despite the growing assets.

Some of the best performers for the bear market had an awful quarter and some of the worst performers during the bear market had a good quarter.

Utilities and real estate are pretty narrow sectors. And real estate has had such a run, I would be hesitant to add more at this point. So I generally recommend diversified dividend plays.

When gold and Russia and India are the top-performing sectors, that's a dangerous space to be investing in.

Fidelity bases its IPO allocation policy entirely on asset size and that's the way it should be.

You have a very conservative strategy even though the bond stake isn't great. They're not going to stretch to produce yield.

You have to ask yourself why you should trust the fund company.

We expect the Vanguard 500 Index Fund to surpass the Magellan Fund in terms of net managed assets by late next year or early 2000.

Putnam is in the early stages of a restructuring effort aimed at providing better, more reliable performance. It may be years before Putnam funds have a lot of appeal. Stock-picking skill and experience aren't changed overnight. Even if Haldeman and (head of research Josh) Brooks succeed, it will be years before their changes can markedly improve investment results.

Despite those amazing returns, by and large all those funds really did was lose money for a lot of people. One of the main points of owning a mutual fund is to be able to access high-quality professional management. But you are throwing that away when you buy funds like these with some manager who just happened to get lucky.

You need to develop an investment plan and understand what risks you're taking.

A tax-managed fund is simply a fund who's goal it is to maximize after-tax returns, whereas most funds are focused on pretax returns, ... I think the one thing that probably all of them have is the idea of selling losers to offset gains. If you've just realized profits on one stock you'll sell a few dogs.

It's a challenging thing to do, and probably can be done a little more tax-efficiently by the mutual fund than by the investor who has fewer holdings.

It's a good strategy, a good manager, just not a very appealing wrapper.

The big funds are very well managed and very well diversified. They might fall as hard as the S&P, but there aren't a lot of big disasters there.

In general, the more volatile a fund, the more likely it is that investors will be motivated by fear or greed.

If you thought you were the only one having a hard time finding a good small-cap fund, foreign or domestic, that was still open and not too bloated from assets, think again.

High costs, the lack of an age-based option and poor investment choices make these options unappealing on almost every level.

Generally, what you'll find is a pretty normal distribution (among socially responsible mutual funds). As far as I can tell, those screens don't have an impact positively or negatively on performance.

Generally you go with a manager who has a meaningful track record somewhere. It doesn't guarantee this is a smart or good manager, but at least it said I've got a few years and I can learn a lot from that.

A key challenge for investors is picking funds whose asset bases haven't become too fat to be handled effectively.