Montgomery Growth Fund owns some CMVT.
biz.yahoo.com
Thursday January 4, 5:08 pm Eastern Time
Morningstar.com
Montgomery Growth Fund Gets a Makeover
By Michael Gaul
There have been plenty of changes at Montgomery Growth Fund (Nasdaq: MNGFX - news) lately. New manager Andy Pratt took over in June 2000 and remodeled the fund. He has sold almost all of the fund's small- and mid-cap stocks and moved into market giants. Gone are the relatively large stakes in industrials and durables, replaced by a good slug of technology. Top holdings now include General Electric (NYSE: GE - news) and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO - news).
With the fund under construction, performance during this period is not too illuminating. For what it's worth, though, from June 1, 2000 through December 29, 2000, the fund's 12% loss was four percentage points worse than the S&P 500 index's. According to Pratt, in the second half of the year, an overweighting in financials, as well as some good picks in the sector, helped performance relative to the bogy. So did tech holdings such as Comverse Technologies (Nasdaq: CMVT - news), Automatic Data Processing (NYSENYSE: ADP), and Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM - news) and an underweight in telecom services. Compared with the index, the fund didn't hold many consumer-staple, utilities, or health-care stocks during that period, and that hurt relative returns (the fund has bulked up its health-care stake recently, however). Also, the staples and utilities stocks it did own, including a sizable position in Enron (NYSE: ENE - news), performed poorly versus those in the index. |
