Thursday, March 20, 2008

Fidelity Magellan? No Thanks.

I just saw an advertisement in the New Yorker that Fidelity's Magellan stock fund is opening up to new investors again. Magellan is an old actively-managed stock fund that likes to tout it's above-average returns, and push an air of exclusivity due to it being closed to new investors for some time.

But is it truly an above-average fund? If you look at the return on your investment if you had invested in Magellan around seven years ago, it would be down about 27%. If you had taken the same money and put it in an index fund that tracked the S&P 500, you'd be up 15%.

No thanks, Fidelity. I'll stick to indexing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you sure about those numbers?
Looking at http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=FMAGX&a=08&b=2&c=1986&d=02&e=21&f=2008&g=m
Avg closing price for Mar 2001 was 66.86 and closing price today was 80.56.
Not that I care about this particular fund, but I was just surprised that any fund can be so poorly managed.

George said...

I think adjusted close is taking into account all of the dividend distributions of the fund. Which is not to be ignored, but I was just focused on the price.

Yahoo says the actual closing price on Mar 01 was 104.50. Google, while graphical, shows it roughly there as well.