Happy Birthday, MITTX

On Saturday, the granddaddy of mutual funds — the Massachusetts Investors Trust Fund (MITTX) — will celebrate its 85th birthday. As one might expect from an octogenarian, the $2.1 billion fund, managed by MFS Investment Management of Boston, is fairly conservative, concentrating on large-cap stocks with strong fundamentals, said Kevin Beatty, co-manager of the fund and director of U.S. equity research at MFS. Leverage has never been part of the strategy of the nation's first open-end fund. "We don't expect to have blowout stock sectors," Mr. Beatty said. "We want to make sure we put together a portfolio that gets us a little better return than the [Standard & Poor's 500 stock index] over time, with a good long-term time horizon." Over the nine decades of its existence, the fund has had positive returns in seven. If an investor were lucky enough to have had a parent or grandparent who put $1,000 into the fund in 1924, he would have had $1.2 million by the end of last year. The fund has not been immune to the carnage on Wall Street. Last year, it was down 32.8%, faring slightly better than the S&P 500, which slid 38.5%. This year, through March 11, the fund is down 17.4%. Currently, the fund is modestly overweight in consumer staples, health care and technology, and underweight in financials, said Mr. Beatty, who began managing the fund in 2005 and was soon joined by co-manager Nicole Zatlyn. The pair has trimmed the fund's holdings to 80, from 125. They also increased its international exposure to about 15%, from single digits. Given the fund's history, it may have learned a thing or two about thriving in tough times. From 1929 to 1934 — during the nadir of the Great Depression — its investor base grew from 5,000 to 21,000. And that was when the fund's minimum investment, $250, was about half the price of a new car. Today, the minimum for individual retirement accounts remains $250, although for other accounts it's $1,000, or about half the price of a very old car.