Most individual investors understand that Wall Street is designed to sell you a product with the occasional ancillary benefit of adding value.

That is especially true in the mutual fund business where there are now thousands of mutual funds exchange traded funds, and other packaged products. The choices are immense.

Not surprisingly, there is an entire industry that has developed to help you, the fund connoisseur, pick and choose the best of the best for your portfolios. At the top of the list is Morningstar and its fund rating system.

Over time, Morningstar's system has become more and more complex. To help make it less so, Morningstar offers investors a plethora of articles and other information to help you better utilize their information and research.

One of the standard gimmicks used by Morningstar and others in the business is the so-called "Hot Fund" feature. The idea is to identify those mutual funds that have the "hottest" performance record. Theses are the funds that offer the highest returns, usually one, three or five years. The idea behind the feature is to highlight the cream of the crop in fund management.

That is a bad advice if you ask me.

Riding on the Coattails of a Hot Fund Manager? Don't Do It.

Riding the coattails of a hot manager may sound like a good idea in principle, but in practice, the results of such a strategy fall far short of expectations. One could argue that in many cases the hot manager will start lagging the market right about the time he becomes a hot manager.

How do I know this? Well for starters, I have been that hot manager in the past, and I know firsthand how difficult it is to stay on top, especially in the short run.

See, markets are a funny thing. At some moments your approach may be on top, at other times...