His idea, to use no-load mutual funds instead of individual stocks and bonds to professionally manage assets on behalf of clients, was unheard of at the time. The mutual fund industry in those days was in its infancy. The vast majority of funds carried 8.5% loads or sales charges and were sold by brokers. Only a few dozen no-load funds were available and it was almost impossible to obtain useful performance data on them.

Burt reasoned that there were many folks out there like himself: investors who'd been burned by Wall Street brokers and were looking for investment alternatives that gave the little guy an even break. No-load mutual funds were just the ticket. Funds afforded easy, low-cost access to the talents and research of many of the country's leading money managers. By spreading the costs among many shareholders, funds allow small investors to own professionally managed portfolios of stocks or bonds previously available only to the very wealthy. But deciding which funds to buy was not so easy.

Using a spreadsheet and an adding machine, Burt began calculating the returns for all the no-load funds available, arranging the data in a tabulated form. Using this data he compared funds that appeared to have similar risk or volatility, and from these he chose the best performers. He continually tracked each fund's performance and, when a fund began to lag its peers, he would redeem the shares and direct the proceeds to a better performing alternative. Burt slowly built up a list of clients.

Eventually Burt decided that the information he was collecting to make his investment decisions might be valuable to other investors. In April 1976, he began publishing fund performance data in a monthly newsletter called "NoLoad Fundex." [The name was meant to suggest an index - in the sense of a tabular list or catalogue. Today we've come to associate the term index with market indicators such as the S&P 500 Index. Such gauges were not so widely talked about 25 years ago.]

He soon altered the spelling to "**NoLoad Fund*X" incorporating asterisks, or "stars" into the name. The newsletter, of course, was produced on an ordinary typewriter, and an asterisk was as close as anyone could come to a star in those days. The highest-ranked funds in each issue were marked with two asterisks and subscribers were encouraged to "Follow the Stars" to achieve stellar performance. We still feature each month's top funds in our front-page Star Boxes.

Gradually, the number of subscribers grew, as did the number of funds listed. Over time the investment strategy known as Upgrading took shape.

By the middle of 1995 DAL had $150 million under management. By mid-1997 that had grown to $250 million.

With the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s, investment newsletters experienced a real crisis. Much of the performance data that previously had been so hard for investors to obtain became readily available for free on the Web. Investment letters lost subscribers, and NoLoad Fund*X was no exception. Gradually, though, many investors decided that abundant data was not all they needed to succeed at investing. They also needed guidance and a practical system to follow.

Today NoLoad Fund*X has over 13,000 subscribers and DAL oversees $2 billion applying the Upgrading strategy to portfolios of stocks, mtuual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs).

That success is the result of a simple idea that simply works.