Watch original video:

It’s been a terrible year for the stock market, only a banner 12 months for misconduct, misguided reflection, and outrageous maneuvering in the mutual-fund business.

That’s why there’s plenty of material during the 2008 Lump of Coal Awards, presented to the mutual-fund industry’s pernicious little children, the ones who deserve nothing more than a bituminous bauble in their Christmas stocking this year.

Last week, this column dropped coal on some of 2008’s miscreants. Now it’s time for the rest. Bad results alone are not enough to earn the prize here: Lump of Coal Awards recognize managers, executives, firms, watchdogs and others for action, attitude, manner or performance that is bumbling, invading, disingenuous, reprehensible or straightforward plain stolid.

And the losers are:

Ardent supporters of exchange-traded funds

Category: The year’s most irrational exuberance.

With ordinary funds misery, many people touted the benefits of exchange-traded funds as an inherently better progress to be of service, as admitting that the ETF structure automatically made a pooled investment good. ETF estate ballooned as a result of this kind of reflection, peaking in mid-September, just in time for the market’s big deterioration.

Don’t get me tort, I love the ETF structure. But ETFs are not immune to the problems plaguing traditional funds, particularly when it comes to performance. For proof, give this: Since the first ETF was launched in 1989, according to Morningstar, the ETF industry collectively has produced a gin loss for investors. In other words, perspicuous all ETF investors together and, on the firm, the only ones to profit from the evolution of the exchange-traded foundation would be the firms creating the ETFs in the first place.

• Fidelity Investments

Category: Worst actor mixed big government bonds companies

Investors in actively managed funds come short their managers to outperform the benchmark when the going is real, and to lose less than the average in the peer group when the market is in the cistern. That’session particularly true at Fidelity, which has always prided itself on its stock-picking, hinting that it has an edge in any “stockpicker’s market” and having a richness track record end downturns to prove it.

In 2008, however, Fidelity stuck likewise a long time with a global growth strategy, and shareholders got slaughtered. Two-thirds of Fidelity’session 180 actively-managed domestic equity funds currently rank below their average predicament peer for the year; more than half of Fido’s international funds are in the same boat. Fido has 42 managers working on growth and growth-and-income funds, and 37 are lagging the S&P 500 this year.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008565187_jaffe28.html?syndication=rss