This Midsize-Company Growth Fund Keeps Beating the Market

Akre Focus' "three-legged stool" approach seems to be working.

It’s been a rough year for the U.S. stock market, but Akre Focus (AKREX) is hanging tough. The fund’s one-year return of 4.3% outpaced Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index by 4.9 percentage points and the average midsize-company growth fund (the category to which Morningstar assigns Akre) by 3.4 points. If Akre finishes the year ahead of the S&P 500, it will mark the fifth time in its six full years of existence that it topped or matched the market (Akre nipped the index by 0.04 percentage point in 2012).

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Nellie S. Huang
Senior Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Nellie joined Kiplinger in August 2011 after a seven-year stint in Hong Kong. There, she worked for the Wall Street Journal Asia, where as lifestyle editor, she launched and edited Scene Asia, an online guide to food, wine, entertainment and the arts in Asia. Prior to that, she was an editor at Weekend Journal, the Friday lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal Asia. Kiplinger isn't Nellie's first foray into personal finance: She has also worked at SmartMoney (rising from fact-checker to senior writer), and she was a senior editor at Money.