- The stock market is on track for its worst year since the 2008 financial crisis.
- Still, a crop of fund managers made the right bets that put them ahead of the rest of the market.
As an investor, there are some periods when everything in the market performs so poorly that merely losing less money than your peers earns you brownie points.
2022 will go down in history as one of those years.
Even the most bearish Wall Street equity strategist among those who annually forecast the market's fortunes did not foresee at the start of 2022 that the S&P 500 would be on track for its worst year since the financial crisis.
The real bragging rights belong to investors who anticipated the forces that would drive the market lower and adjusted accordingly or maintained their positions to take advantage. The most potent force of all was 40-year high inflation, an aftershock of supply chains that the COVID-19 pandemic mangled over the last three years. It triggered central banks into making their largest interest-rate hikes in decades to fend off higher prices, with devastating results for stocks that had benefited from a low-rate regime.
Still, it was the perfect environment for certain types of stock pickers to shine. Broadly speaking, those with heavy bets on value stocks, dividend-rich companies, and the energy sector did well. We profiled the 10 best mutual fund managers to learn how they came out ahead, including:
- A buy-and-hold strategy that was born out of the Great Depression and succeeded with more than two dozen of its original picks from 87 years ago.
- The pair of fund managers who outperformed this year despite targeting the same types of companies as many of their competitors.
- The stock picker whose goal is to pick the right dividend-yielding stocks that can provide a "high, rising income stream to grandma" — and how he nailed it in 2022.