Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, November 2nd.

Today on Forbes, gold stocks are supercharging this forgotten fund.

Twenty years ago, Wexford, Pennsylvania-based Mullen Camp Fund was a perennial star on Forbes' annual

mutual fund honor roll list. Year after year, it bested the S&P 500,

using a low-risk investment formula seeking large and small-cap companies whose return on

equity surpassed their price earnings ratios and whose revenue growth was at least 10% a year.

It owns stocks like Ford, Alaska Airlines, and Lockheed Martin.

But in the early 2000s, founder Ron Mullencamp began loading up on stocks of home builders

like NVR and Beezer Homes, which appeared to be great bargains on paper, just as the housing

bubble was filling up with

irrational exuberance.

Fund assets swelled from around $200 million in the late 1990s to more than $3 billion

just prior to the financial crisis.

That's when Mullencamp and other value stock managers hit a wall.

The fund's assets plummeted to $1 billion by the end of 2009.

Over the next 15 years, an investment in Mullencamp fund would have produced less than 9%

per year, while merely owning the increasingly tech-heavy S&P 500 would have produced a 12%

annual return. The family fund continued to lose

customers, and by 2023, assets were $350 million. Enter Ron's son, Jeffrey Mullencamp, who had spent

20 years in the Army and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2008 before joining his father

in the business as an analyst. Jeff, who was 59 years old and who assumed control of his

family's namesake fund in 2020, recalls, quote, Ron's performance was extraordinary, but he ended

...