When you have a big fund it’s harder for the fund manager to maneuver. For example, a pretty darn good fund in the Fidelity family of funds is the Contrafund. However, it’s become rather large at greater than 70 billion dollars in assets.
So, the fund becomes representative of the market. If the market goes up, most likely the fund will go up and if the market goes down, most likely the fund will go down. The fund’s manager has to get creative to move those types of dollars around.
It’s like parking semi-trucks in a fast food restaurant. So what to do? Well, I still think if you don’t have other choices, the Fidelity Contrafund is still a great fund with a great fund manager. I would hold it in a company retirement plan like a 401k, 403b, 457 Plans.
But, there are smaller funds in this category of Large Company Growth funds that are more agile. It would be good to find a fund with a great fund manager that is managing say 1 or 2 billion dollars worth of assets.
So one example would be the Brandywine Blue (BLUEX) fund. It has more than 2 billion dollars in managed assets and the fund manager William F. D’Alonzo would have more strategies to implement with the investments in the fund. However, the initial investment to get into this fund would be a whopping $10,000.00 but there is no load (fee) to get in, during or out of the fund.
So for some folks this is just an example and not what you should do with your money.