THE YEAR'S BEST-PERFORMING IPO

Shareholders in the regular Fidelity mutual funds include millions of investors saving for retirement as well as employee 401(k) plans at top corporations such as Facebook, IBM and Oracle.

Those mom-and-pop investors missed out on 2015's best-performing IPO. Fidelity funds stayed on the sidelines as shares of Aclaris Therapeutics Inc skyrocketed after the drug maker listed its stock in October 2015.

F-Prime invested $16.3 million in Aclaris before the IPO - a stake whose value soared to $83.2 million in the first three months after the public offering, U.S. regulatory filings show.

Even if Fidelity fund managers had wanted to buy Aclaris shares after the IPO, in the open market, F-Prime's stake of nearly 20 percent stake may have prevented them from doing so because of Fidelity's guidelines on investing in companies in which the venture arm has a "substantial" stake.

Aclaris was 2015's top public debut, its shares appreciating 145 percent over the $11 IPO price, according to Renaissance Capital, an IPO research and management firm.

At the end of June, F-Prime still held nearly 2.8 million Aclaris shares, a 13 percent stake, worth $51.5 million, according to Fidelity's latest quarterly holdings disclosure. Fidelity funds did not own any Aclaris shares.

Fidelity fund competitors had no restraints on investing in Aclaris. Franklin Templeton funds bought nearly 1.2 million shares in the company in the month of the IPO, Franklin disclosures show. The Fidelity competitors, including the Franklin Small Cap Growth Fund, saw their combined initial stake of $17.3 million more than double in less than two months.

The Johnson-led venture arm scored another big payday when Adaptimmune Therapeutics plc went public in May 2015. F-Prime's $8 million pre-IPO investment in the bioscience company surged in value to more than $270 million in the weeks after the IPO, Fidelity disclosures show.

Investors in the American Funds SmallCap World Fund , a Fidelity competitor, capitalized, too. The SmallCap World Fund made a similar-sized pre-IPO investment and saw a similar return, American disclosures show.

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