Despite the year’s jarring volatility, the overall market hasn’t done so bad, with the S&P 500 making out 6% gains thus far. But that just means there’s been a few more winners than losers, and some of the losers have been bad.
The same can be said for the mutual fund industry. While a number have looked good so far, a number have produced terrible results. So which funds have fared the worst so far in 2012? Let’s take a look, but first, a couple rules:
- I only looked at funds with a minimum of $100 million in assets. Tiny funds can suffer devastating losses simply because the money managers usually have to deal with large outflows.
- The gold sector was by far the hardest hit so far — in stark contrast for the past decade, in which gold could seem to do no wrong. So, I also only took the worst fund in a category. If not, my list would have only consisted of gold funds!
After crunching the numbers, here are the losers that stood out:
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