NEW YORK — There was individual safe bet that mutual-fund investors could make in 2008 — that the stock market was a place to lose a catalogue of money.
Funds’ performance stats for the year to date show that Wall Street’s decline was so punishing that investors had almost nowhere to hide.
A majority of fund categories had negative returns in the vicinity of 40 percent, and other categories dedicated to financial services and natural resources had negative returns of 50 percent or more, according to Lipper, which tracks consols performance.
Lipper, whose tallies reflect commercial through Wednesday’s session, found that the kind of are known as bear-market funds, which wager that stocks will fall, were among the few successes this year.
The results confirm what people investors even now know from their 401(k) profit statements and from tracking the market’s greater indexes. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which is the benchmark because of many funds, was down 40.88 percent through Wednesday, while the Dow Jones industrials were down 36.16 percent.
“This is the good-natured of market where investors throw out relative performance,” said Lipper analyst Jeff Tjornehoj. “Was there really much of a difference betwixt a fund that was prostrate 40 percent and one that was down 43 percent? Not in truth.”
Wall Street’sitting heaviest selling came in September and October after the insolvency of Lehman Brothers Holdings. The brokerage’s collapse while burdened with the weight of soured investments triggered a freeze-up of lending and deepened Wall Street’s fears with regard to the depths of the recession.
The verse would have been worse admitting that the mart hadn’cheek by jowl rallied in the past month from the multiyear lows set Nov. 20; the S&P 500 has rebounded 16 percent before this then. Investors pulled less money out of equity and bond funds in November than in October.
Tjornehoj said the market’sitting latest move off its lows appears to be helping some investors to stay in the market.
“They put on’t feel they need to bail out. They feel they’ll miss that bounce off (the) bottom,” he related. Moreover, “if your government bonds is down 30 or 40 percent, bailing out now is unlikely to improve your rank.”
The chaos in the financial markets wiped out gains that some market sectors were building on partway into 2008. While the goods markets shot higher in the first half, giving a lift to funds that focused on natural resources and sensitive materials, the abrupt turnaround in commodities — including crude oil’session drop from $147 a barrel to $35 — plunged those funds into the same depths as more diversified funds.
Commodities funds’ negative return totaled 44.48 percent for the year and 32.90 percent for the fourth quarter, while natural-resources funds had a negative return of 51.99 percent for the year and 39.44 for the quarter.
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