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With barely five months' trading history, it’s a little too early to be making a call on how well the fund will track its benchmark over time. From inception, on March 5, 2007, through July 31, RYMFX has consistently outperformed, gaining 1.37 percent compared with the benchmark’s 1 percent.

That outperformance persisted in late July and early August, when severe whipsaws in global stock, currency and fixed-income markets hit many active managers hard; over that period, RYMFX lost 1.35 percent, compared with a drop of almost 1.6 percent in the DTI benchmark.

It’s almost a quarter century since the late Prof. John V. Lintner of Harvard University presented "The Potential Role of Managed Commodity-Financial Futures Accounts (and/or Funds) in Portfolios of Stocks and Bonds" to what was then the Financial Analysts Federation. Its essential thesis, that the low correlation of managed futures to other investment classes both improved returns and reduced portfolio volatility, has rarely been disputed.

The challenge, especially for retail and mass affluent investors, has been gaining access to the strategy’s benefits in an inexpensive—in terms of both minimum investment and fee structure—and convenient investment vehicle. That happy day appears, at last, to have arrived.

NOTES

• RYMFX was launched as the Rydex Managed Futures Fund. The word "Strategies" was added recently.
• Apart from the figure for total assets, all performance and other RYMFX data is based on the H share class.

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