There is a deluge of mutual fund books available at the start of the 60-day season (which begins Jan. 1) when most taxpayers begin planning their Registered Retirement Savings Plan investments. Mutual funds are a common investment for RRSPs, but with nearly 3,000 funds available in Canada, choice is the investor’s dilemma.

Both of these books are aimed at guiding the investor through the mutual fund jungle. In The Best of the Best 2000, Wilfred Vos, a senior executive with Montreal’s influential mutual and pension fund manager TAL Global Asset Management Inc, and Bruce McDougall, an able financial writer, use a complex methodology that presents investment results for a variety of time periods. Their risk and reward balancing system addresses the issue of actual gains, which vary according to investment time and the starting period of measurement. Based on their methodology, McDougall and Vos offer up 70 different mutual funds for readers.

For each fund, they provide an assessment of performance, risk, and future prospects. Their selected funds include the esoteric, such as the Talvest Foreign Pay Canadian Bond. They have not included well-known old names like Templeton Growth, a fund that has recently underperformed its benchmark index. The authors also list 20 large cap stocks like Royal Bank and BCE Inc. that have some of the properties of mutual funds, such as a diversified investment base, and are therefore alternatives to mutual funds. In all, readers can use this book to enhance their critical skills as investors, as well as use it as a tip sheet on which assets to buy. A valuable, provocative book, it deserves a place on every serious investor’s shelf.

Susan Heinrich and Jonathan Chevreau, authors of National Post Smart Funds 2000, are mutual fund journalists. Stephen Kangas is an executive of a financial institution. They join their expertise to advance the case for buying mutual funds not only on their own merits, but also because they are part of mutual fund companies with many attractive offerings into which any investment can be switched for little or no cost. The premise that the fund family should have extensive choices is important to investors who buy funds that charge deferred commissions, a.k.a. backloads. In these cases, investors who want to ship out after a couple of years can be hit with high charges of 5% to 8%. Stay within the fund family, and there are no penalty fees.

After dealing with fund families, the authors list 100 interesting funds, from such currently hot performers as AIM Global Technology, up 177% for the 12 months ending Nov. 30, 1999, to esoteric funds like Argentum Market Neutral Portfolio, a hedge fund engineered to allow investors to profit regardless of market volatility. Nonetheless, Argentum lost 12% in the 12 month period that ended Nov. 30, 1999.

In spite of shortcomings, such as including a poorly performing stock like Argentum, this too is a valuable, informative guide.