Starting with Sprott

What if I told you there was a fund out there that had a 25+ year average of making over 25% per year, and did it quite consistently (no wild 300% gains one year, -80% another, etc.) Some people get lucky for a few years, but this is a 25 year-history! Forget that it's hard to find any results that go back even close to that far, this track record was as good as or better than Warren Buffet's. This was not luck.

This nearly impossible feat is what Eric Sprott managed to accomplish in his private managed accounts at Sprott Asset Management. Click HERE for an archived PDF of this performance history. The graph on that page speaks for itself. This is what I had stumbled upon in 2002, and as I began reading articles by this man and seeing what he had done, I knew that this is where I had to put my money. I loved his insight and philosophy to investing. He and his team had (and have continued to) accurately predict what the markets were going to do and where money should be invested; they proved this with their brilliant articles and their stunning results.

Oh, one small snag though that I forgot to mention: you had to be a multi-millionaire to have a managed account. Luckily, Sprott had decided to open up a public mutual fund back in late '98, called the Sprott Canadian Equity Fund which was supposed to follow the same trading style as in his managed accounts, primarily investing in small-cap Canadian stocks. The mutual fund was already averaging over 30% per year for the 5 years it had been open. It made huge gains both during the dot-com boom AND through the bust. Unfortunately, even this mutual fund required a $25,000 minimum investment at the time (later dropped to $5000), an amount that I did not have.

I finally decided to take the plunge at the beginning of 2003, opening a line of credit and borrowing a bunch of money to allow me to make the investment. And I'm glad I did. From 2003-2007, the fund enjoyed the following yearly gains: 30%, 38%, 13%, 40%, and 14%. This is equivalent to about 26% per yr, which is what I had expected. hmmm... maybe I should write a post about the phrase "past performance is not indicative of future returns"...

Anyway, there is too much I could write about Sprott, so I'm not even going to start :) All I can say is you should read every single Markets At A Glance article on their site. And peruse the rest of their site at http://www.sprott.com/.