A story of consistently strong returns

rcarrick@globeandmail.com

What we're looking at

This week's Cruncher series focuses on the largest fund families in Canada. How good are their most popular funds? Today we look at CI Investments.

Our screen

The 25 largest CI funds are listed here along with quartile rankings over a variety of time frames. Quartiles are the best way to measure a fund's performance. They divide funds in a category into four groups according to their returns, with first quartile being most desirable and fourth the basement. Fees are another important factor in evaluating funds. Here, we've included management expense ratios for each fund, plus the category average. Note: Big funds should be much lower than average because of economies of scale.

What we found

Look past those shorter-term fourth-quartile returns for several of CI's most popular funds. Longer-term numbers are vastly more important when evaluating funds and the story they tell here is of consistently strong returns. This applies even to funds that seemingly compete with each other - CI Harbour, CI Canadian Investment and CI Signature Select Canadian. Each of the three is a candidate to anchor the Canadian equity portion of an investor's portfolio.

Of course, there are limits to CI's ability to provide top returns in its most popular products. One is CI Global, which is indicative of the trouble that the Canadian mutual fund industry has had in making decent money for its clients in global markets over the past decade or more. The fund has lost an average 5.5 per cent annually in the decade to May 31, which compares with a category average loss of 2.7 per cent.

Fee-wise, CI is below average but not dramatically so. CI Signature High Income is the top bargain.

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