S&P Announces Mutual Fund Award Finalists

Standard & Poor’s has announced the finalists for its inaugural U.S. Mutual Fund Excellence Awards program.

There are 29 funds, from a starting pool of 19,000 mutual funds. Seventeen fund families are represented across ten categories. Gold, silver and bronze award recipients in each category will be announced during a live video broadcast in November, from S&P’s offices, the company said.

The bond-rating agency selected the funds that most consistently achieved the highest overall quantitative ranking in their category, using its proprietary, holdings-based research. The mutual funds had to do more than just outperform their respective peer groups to become finalists. Each also had to demonstrate quality holdings, manager tenure, risk and expense ratios. For this examination, S&P leaned less heavily on backward-looking performance data.

The awards program also includes three finalists in a “New and Notable” category, which acknowledges performance in funds with a less than three-year track record. “New funds are an important part of the mutual fund landscape, and one that we believe deserves recognition,” according to a statement from Stephen Biggar, managing director of global equity research at Standard & Poor’s. Despite a short track record, these new funds have favorable costs and recently held stocks that are currently viewed positively by S&P’s equity research group.

The complete list of nominees

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