The annual performance rankings of funds or investment newsletters that appear every January are a siren song, tempting us with the prospect of mouthwatering gains but often leading us to financial pain. Consider how you would have fared if, one year ago, you had invested in the U.S.-stock fund at the top of the ranking for performance in the previous calendar year. That fund would have been the trend-betting, Nasdaq-100-tied Quantified STF Fund (QSTFX), according to Morningstar—with an alluring calendar-2017 return of 68.9%,...

Source: Wall Street Journal January 07, 2019 03:11 UTC