https://www.wsj.com/articles/stock-market-fund-benchmark-cha…
**How to Beat the Stock Market Without Even Lying**
**Stock funds have been pulling a switcheroo to make their returns look better: When they don’t measure up, they change how they measure.**
**By Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19, 2022**
**...**
**Fund managers can easily beat the market. All they have to do is change which market they’re trying to beat. ... In as many as two-thirds of the cases, funds made past returns look better by changing the benchmarks they compared themselves to. More than half the time, funds chose a new index that wasn’t even a good match for their strategy....**
**That means you can look at a fund’s past returns this year and see them underperforming the market by a wide margin. The next time you check, the fund could be measuring itself against a different index—a comparison that can suddenly burnish its past returns to a bright sheen....** [end quote]
Bottom line: look at the actual growth numbers of the mutual fund. Use your own judgment to choose a benchmark that matches the fund’s strategy. You should be able to use Yahoo to chart them together.
Wendy