Morningstar ranked The Appleseed Fund #1 returning U.S. midcap value fund among 342 funds and the #1 returning socially responsible domestic equity fund among 166 funds for the three years ended December 31, 2009.
Over the three said years, the Appleseed Fund generated an annualized total return of +8.7%, compared with the -5.6% annualized total return of the S&P 500, which it has outperformed by nearly 14% every year. Last year alone, the Appleseed Fund returned 60.0%, compared with the 26.5% annual return of the S&P 500 Index and was added to the “Morningstar 500″ list of 500 mutual funds considered noteworthy by Morningstar analysts.
In the three short years since its inception, the Appleseed Fund shed its small cap label and shattered the barriers, now with assets under management of over $100 million. To what do the fund mangers attribute their success?; their unique investing strategy and disciplined investment process. The strategy holds the current market requires the Fund’s managers to be especially selective in stock picking with a concentrated approach. The approach maintains positions in approximately 25 carefully researched and monitored equities to enable the Fund managers to be especially discriminating with their investments.
According to one of the Fund’s portfolio managers, Joshua Strauss, “Following the stock market sell-off in 2008, equity markets in 2009 provided a tremendous opportunity to invest in quality companies with first-rate managers, strong balance sheets, and excellent long-term fundamentals at extremely attractive prices….While we are pleased with our 2009 performance, we take particular pride in our investment performance during the 2008 bear market because we protected our investors’ capital better than our peers. We believe a fund’s ability to manage downside risk during bear markets is an important determinant of long-term performance….,” as disclosed in a recent press release.
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