The Origins of Upgrading

When Burt Berry boldly began DAL Investment Company in 1969, the noload mutual fund industry was in its infancy with only a handful of little known funds. But Burt realized the potential of noload funds. He saw that noloads offered individual investors access to qualified money managers. And when a fund didn’t perform, the investor could easily replace it with a better performing alternative. He began using noload mutual funds to manage client assets instead of traditional stocks and bonds.

Burt calculated the returns for all of the available noload mutual funds by hand, comparing individual fund performance to funds with similar risk and investing only in the funds with the best relative performance. Janet Brown joined Burt in 1978 and she streamlined the Upgrading process by creating the FundX Score which is still used today to determine which funds are the best performers in their respective risk classes.

As the mutual fund industry grew, so did DAL. Burt’s simple idea simply worked. In 1976, DAL began publishing NoLoad Fund*X newsletter, bringing the Upgrading approach to individual investors.

In 2001, Upgrading became even easier when DAL launched the FundX Upgrader Funds. These funds allowed investors to participate in the Upgrading system without the need to actively buy and sell funds in their own accounts.

In 2005, DAL applied the Upgrading strategy to stocks with the inception of the FundX Stock Upgrader Fund (STOCX). STOCX applies the Upgrading strategy to direct investments in stocks instead of mutual funds.

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