Have you been searching for a Sector – Precious Metal fund? You might want to begin with Fidelity Select Gold Portfolio (FSAGX). FSAGX bears a Zacks Mutual Fund Rank of 3 (Hold), which is based on various forecasting factors like size, cost, and past performance.
Objective
The world of Sector – Precious Metal funds is an area filled with options, such as FSAGX. Usually, Sector – Precious Metal mutual funds invest in stocks with a focus on the mining and production of precious metals like gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. Here, stocks often trade as leveraged bets of the underlying commodity, meaning they’re tied to the metal’s prices and can be volatile.
History of Fund/Manager
FSAGX finds itself in the Fidelity family, based out of Boston, MA. Fidelity Select Gold Portfolio debuted in December of 1985. Since then, FSAGX has accumulated assets of about $3.63 billion, according to the most recently available information. The fund is currently managed by Boris Shepov who has been in charge of the fund since December of 2024.
Performance
Investors naturally seek funds with strong performance. This fund carries a 5-year annualized total return of 19.04%, and is in the bottom third among its category peers. If you’re interested in shorter time frames, do not dismiss looking at the fund’s 3-year annualized total return of 36.68%, which places it in the bottom third during this time-frame.
It is important to note that the product’s returns may not reflect all its expenses. Any fees not reflected would lower the returns. Total returns do not reflect the fund’s [%] sale charge. If sales charges were included, total returns would have been lower.
When looking at a fund’s performance, it is also important to note the standard deviation of the returns. The lower the standard deviation, the less volatility the fund experiences. The standard deviation of FSAGX over the past three years is 34.24% compared to the category average of 14.76%. The standard deviation of the fund over the past 5 years is 33.99% compared to the category average of 16.24%. This makes the fund more volatile than its peers over the past half-decade.
Risk Factors
Investors should not forget about beta, an important way to measure a mutual fund’s risk compared to the market as a whole. FSAGX has a 5-year beta of 0.6, which means it is likely to be less volatile than the market average. Alpha is an additional metric to take into consideration, since it represents a portfolio’s performance on a risk-adjusted basis relative to a benchmark, which in this case, is the S&P 500. The fund has produced a positive alpha over the past 5 years of 14.08, which shows that managers in this portfolio are skilled in picking securities that generate better-than-benchmark returns.
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