Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Thrasher Funds: Why We’re Thrashing its GendeX Fund

You have some hard-earned money that you’d like to invest. Who would you feel more comfortable having manage it: the first guy pictured or the second?

I’d go with the more bookish-looking gentleman in the first photo. Turns out, however, the man behind the white shades is actually the same person pictured in the first shot: James Perkins, portfolio manager at Thrasher Funds. That’s not to be confused with Thrasher, the skateboarding magazine. He chose to list the photo on the left alongside his profile on Thrasher’s website; the other one ran with his Thestreet.com column.

Thrasher launched a mutual fund last month — the GendeX Fund – which is being marketed towards, you guessed it, Gen X and Gen Y. A group, that, according to Thrasher, looks something like this:

We’ll get to the fund’s stats in a minute. First, we need to talk about the marketing strategy. Let’s start with the name. Thrasher. To me, thrashing is something you do in a mosh pit. I don’t want my money flailing about wildly. A slow but steady climb will do.

And I think I can speak for my Gen X brethren when I say we don’t take well to gimmickry or pandering. Knowing that I’m investing with the cool kids doesn’t make me feel confident about the fund itself.

As for its investment strategy, Thrasher picks companies based on what it calls the Demographic Convergence Thesis. It goes something like this: It’s not uncommon to see members of Gen X and Gen Y shopping at the same places as their Baby Boomer parents, who are living longer and want to stay young. Thrasher looks for companies benefiting from trends fueled by both ends of the demographic spectrum, say Apple or Louis Vuitton.

While this strategy would seem to favor retail stocks, Thrasher says it’s not limiting itself to any one sector. Still, investors of all ages need very broad diversification – especially those who might have only enough money to plunk in one fund.

Some other fund facts:

• Thrasher has never managed a mutual fund before GendeX, but it has (and still does) run a hedge fund based on the same investment theory. Still, we’d like to see at least a three-year track record at the mutual fund before we did anything. Thrasher says they can’t release the hedge fund’s results for regulatory reasons.

• The fund charges a 1.5% fee, so if you invest $1,000, it’ll cost you $15 each year. That’s a tad more than the average actively-managed stock fund’s 1.39%. You can do much better on fees, at least, with a super cheap index fund, which will provide access to the broader market and cost as little as $1 a year.

• You can start investing with just $100, as long as you join Thrasher’s automatic investing plan, which will deduct $50 from your bank account each month. We normally like this sort of friendliness to investors with little money, but Thrasher also tacks $2 in monthly fees on to accounts with less than $2,500.

The folks at Thrasher say they want to bring new investors into the fray and create a comfortable environment for people to learn about money. That’s a good thing — and not unlike our philosophy here at FiLife. And, for all we know, James Perkins might be the next Warren Buffet.

But as far as their marketing strategy goes, it doesn’t do much for me. A fund manager doesn’t need to be a hipster in order to grab my attention. A dud, albeit a smart dud, will do just fine, thank you.

–Tara Siegel Bernard