Aiming at the unique investment opportunities offered by the Internet, the Jacob Internet Fund seeks to achieve long-term growth of capital by investing in companies that derive their revenue from Internet-related businesses. The portfolio manager Ryan Jacob is looking for companies with good management teams with experience, a barrier to entry in their business and companies trading at reasonable valuations relative to their growth.

Wendy Trevisani, the co-manager of the Thornburg International Value Fund together with Bill Fries and Lei Wang, runs a focused and, yet, diversified portfolio. With no constraints on industries, capitalization sizes, or geographies, the fund looks anywhere to find value and growth potential, including the emerging markets. Its long-term bias and a global approach allow the fund to spot opportunities that others may neglect and play them in a variety of ways.

In a category that is relatively inaccessible to individual investors, such as the booming mergers and acquisitions market, the AXA Enterprise Mergers & Acquisitions Fund emerges as a viable investment option. Focusing both on announced and potential deals in the U.S. and abroad, the fund is generally diversified across approximately 250 companies in order to capture low-risk returns when the deal is secure or large movements that result from potential takeovers.

Not too many funds dare to combine mutual funds and individual stocks in one portfolio, but the holdings of Rogé Partners Fund are bind together by the idea of investing in great managers and businesses. Utilizing a flexible strategy for exploiting valuation anomalies globally and across all market capitalizations, the manager Steve Rogé selects only about 50 holdings, and yet achieves the global allocation necessary to limit the risks.

While most investors tend to go with the flow when exploring the Asian markets, the Wells Fargo Advantage Asia Pacific Fund is using every tool at its disposal to get in early on new investment ideas. In order to take advantage of all the opportunities in developed and emerging Asian countries, portfolio manager Anthony Cragg seeks both growth and value situations, as well as larger- and smaller-cap stocks.

Using the complexity in the contemporary global fixed income landscape, Putnam Diversified Income Trust looks to build a dynamic pool of income earning strategies. Portfolio manager Bill Kohli and his team of specialists aim at identifying interesting investment strategies and finding a way to reduce the risk of overexposure to any one sector.

Stock selection is the key to successful investing in the small cap arena where the majority of stocks under-perform the market. Dunham Small Cap Value Fund has a team of six analysts whose job is to identify small cap stocks using a bottom-up fundamental stock selection process that have positive cash flow and are using excess cash flow to benefit shareholders.

Many investors try to follow market leadership but few have a long-term, unbiased, and quantitatively derived strategy to do it. Jason Browne, manager of the FundX Upgrader Fund, doesn’t find any value in trying to predict future leadership. Instead, he relies on an internally developed ranking system to capture broad trends and to select the funds with the most appropriate strategy and risk level in the current environment.