2021 Refinitiv Lipper Awards Wins

Firm assets under supervision as of February 22, 2021.

American Century ranked 9 out of 53 for one-year performance. “How We Rank the Fund Families."

The Refinitiv Lipper Fund Awards, granted annually, highlight funds and fund companies that have excelled in delivering consistently strong risk-adjusted performance relative to their peers. The Refinitiv Lipper Fund Awards are based on the Lipper Leader for Consistent Return rating, which is a risk-adjusted performance measure calculated over 36, 60 and 120 months. The fund with the highest Lipper Leader for Consistent Return (Effective Return) value in each eligible classification wins the Refinitiv Lipper Fund Award. For more information, see lipperfundawards.com Although Refinitiv Lipper makes reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data contained herein, the accuracy is not guaranteed by Refinitiv Lipper.

Refinitiv Lipper Fund Awards, ©2021 Refinitiv. All rights reserved. Used under license.

A One Choice Target Date Portfolio's target date is the approximate year when investors plan to retire or start withdrawing their money. The principal value of the investment is not guaranteed at any time, including at the target date.

Each target-date One Choice Target Date Portfolio seeks the highest total return consistent with American Century Investments' proprietary asset mix. Over time, the asset mix and weightings are adjusted to be more conservative. In general, as the target year approaches, the portfolio's allocation becomes more conservative by decreasing the allocation to stocks and increasing the allocation to bonds and cash equivalents.

By the time each fund reaches its target year, its target asset mix will become fixed and will match that of One Choice In Retirement Portfolio.

How We Rank the Fund Families

All mutual and exchange-traded funds are required to report their returns (to regulators as well as in advertising and marketing material) after fees are deducted, to better reflect what investors would actually experience. But our aim is to measure manager skill, independent of expenses beyond annual management fees. That’s why we calculate returns before any 12b-1 fees are deducted. Similarly, fund loads, or sales charges, aren’t included in our calculation of returns.

Each fund’s performance is measured against all of the other funds in its Refinitiv Lipper category, with a percentile ranking of 100 being the highest and one the lowest. This result is then weighted by asset size, relative to the fund family’s other assets in its general classification. If a family’s biggest funds do well, that boosts its overall ranking; poor performance in its biggest funds hurts a firm’s ranking.

To be included in the ranking, a firm must have at least three funds in the general equity category, one world equity, one mixed equity (such as a balanced or target-date fund), two taxable bond funds, and one national tax-exempt bond fund.

Single-sector and country equity funds are factored into the rankings as general equity. We exclude all passive index funds, including pure index, enhanced index, and index-based, but include actively managed ETFs and so-called smart-beta ETFs, which are passively managed but created from active strategies.

Finally, the score is multiplied by the weighting of its general classification, as determined by the entire Lipper universe of funds. The category weightings for the one-year results in 2020 were general equity, 35.6%; mixed asset, 20.7%; world equity, 17.3%; taxable bond, 21.9%; and tax-exempt bond, 4.8%.

The category weightings for the five-year results were general equity, 36.2%; mixed asset, 20.9%; world equity, 16.9%; taxable bond, 21.6%; and tax-exempt bond, 4.4%. For the 10-year list, they were general equity, 37.5%; mixed asset, 19.5%; world equity, 17.3; taxable bond, 20.8%; and tax-exempt bond, 4.8%.

The scoring: Say a fund in the general U.S. equity category has $500 million in assets, accounting for half of the firm’s assets in that category, and its performance lands it in the 75th percentile for the category. The first calculation would be 75 times 0.5, which comes to 37.5. That score is then multiplied by 35.6%, general equity’s overall weighting in Lipper’s universe. So it would be 37.5 times 0.356, which equals 13.35. Similar calculations are done for each fund in our study. Then the numbers are added for each category and overall. The shop with the highest total score wins. The same process is repeated to determine the five- and 10-year rankings.