Mario Gabelli's Gabelli ABC Fund emerged as the No.1 fund in the Wall Street Journal's quarterly Winner's Circle contest, which looks at the best performers over the past 12 months among diversified U.S.-stock funds. The $250 million fund recorded a loss of 1.2 percent during the period.

The Intrepid Small Cap Fund, down 5.7 percent during the period, came in second place, while Forester Value, down 8.9 percent, took the No. 3 spot. The results of the Winner's Circle contest were featured in an article by Daisy Maxey called Winning=Losing, which formed part of the WSJ's Investing in Funds: A Quarterly Analysis report published Monday.

In the article What the Past Teaches Us About Today, veteran fund managers such as Tweedy, Browne's Will Browne and John Spears, Lord Abbett's Robert Dow, Dodge & Cox' John Gunn, Royce Funds' Chuck Royce and Dimensional Fund Advisors' David Booth and ClearBridge Advisors' Harry "Hersh" Cohen, compared the 1793-1974 bear market with the current downturn.

Tom Lauricella looked at the issues surrounding target-date funds in the article Let's Set a Target, and Date for fixing Target-Date Funds,.

The 11-article Investing in Funds section also includes Laggards Get the Boot, in which Leslie Scism and Daisy Maxey noted that some insurers are reducing the number of actively managed stock funds they offer to investors in variable annuities, and are increasingly moving towards index-based funds; and The ABCs of ETFs, in which Jonathan Burton guides investors on what to do if they want to switch to ETFs.  

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