Taking a look at the TradeKing Leaderboard for the past six months, it's clear that some traders have found ways to make money this year despite a horrendous investment environment. During that time period, Lamp is up 556%, shortseller is up 507%, Uranium Pinto Beans is up 261%, mpc220 is up 235% and snowman is up 231%. So it was a bit shocking to see an article in Business Week pointing out that -- out of the 11,585 U.S. and international stock mutual funds tracked by Morningstar -- 11,584 have lost money in 2008 (according to fund data through November 20).That's right, ladies and gentlemen, every single stock mutual fund except one has lost money in 2008. While many mutual funds have difficulty beating the market or outperforming a particular benchmark each year, the fact that only one mutual fund managed to eke out a non-negative return is truly a once-in-a-lifetime type of event:

"Annette Larson, who is Morningstar’s chief data cruncher, has worked at the Chicago firm since 1994. “I’ve never seen it this bad before,” she says. In fact, she was certain she made a mistake when she analyzed the most recent mutual fund data. “I thought to myself: ‘This cannot be right,’ so I did it again, and again, and then I realized all but one fund is negative. I’m in awe,” Larson says."

Compared to the average mutual fund, an individual brokerage account has a lot more flexibility. Many of the individuals on the TradeKing Leaderboard are trading options, for example. Still, that's no excuse for the abysmal performance of U.S. mutual fund managers thus far in 2008. Absolute performance should be the benchmark, not relative performance.

[image: TradeKing Leaderboard]