Buy-And-Hold Fund Prospers With No New Bets In 80 Years

Equity investors pursuing a buy-and-hold strategy might want to check out a fund that hasn't made an original stock market bet in 80 years.

The Voya Corporate Leaders Trust Fund, now run by a unit of Voya Financial Inc. bought equal amounts of stock in 30 major U.S. corporations in 1935 and hasn't picked a new stock since.

Some of its holdings are unchanged, including DuPont, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Union Pacific. Others were spun off from or acquired from original components, including Berkshire Hathaway (successor to the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway); CBS (acquired by Westinghouse Electric and renamed); and Honeywell (which bought Allied Chemical and Dye). Some are just gone, including the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. and American Can. Twenty-one stocks remain in the fund.

The plan is simple, and the results have been good. Light on banks and heavy on industrials and energy, the fund has beaten 98 percent of its peers, known as large value funds, over both the past five and ten years, according to Morningstar.

"This fund has been around a lot longer than I have, and it's working," said Craig Watkins, 29, an investment analyst for Conover Capital Management in Bellevue, Washington. Conover has recommended the Voya fund to 401(k) plans it advises.

Watkins compared the Voya fund's "deep-value" approach to investor Warren Buffett's, whose Berkshire Hathaway is the fund's second-largest holding.

"It's deep-value in the sense that all the companies in the portfolio have an amazing tenure," Watkins said. He said the Voya fund's strategy can be better than an index fund because it doesn't have to change its weightings when the index changes

The winning performance has drawn record inflows: Since 2011, the fund has taken in about $708 million from investors, its best four years ever, according to Thomson Reuters' Lipper unit.

The fund has made a comeback since 1988, when it was reorganized by Lexington Management in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. Former Lexington executive Lawrence Kantor said high fees tied to its outdated trust structure kept it from getting any flows, and changing to a unit investment trust made it competitive with modern funds.

The fund "was dead in the water for like 20 years" because "it had such an outdated structure that it wasn't saleable," Kantor said.

Told the fund now has $1.7 billion, Kantor, 67, said "That’s incredible, because when we reopened the fund I think it had $60 million in assets."