Best Performing Mutual Funds of the Last 10 Years: A Financial Advisor’s Perspective

Updated as of: September 9, 2025

Mutual funds have long been a staple in portfolios for their ability to deliver diversification, professional management, and tailored exposure to specific sectors or asset classes.

Evaluating long-term performance is essential for identifying funds that demonstrate resilience, consistent returns, and strong management practices. This article highlights the best-performing mutual funds over various lookback periods in the last decade. 

To create this list, we analyzed the entire mutual fund universe using the YCharts Fund Screener to find the best-performing US-domiciled equity mutual funds over 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, and 10-year timeframes. (Leveraged and inverse mutual funds as well as those in the alternative currency strategy and options arbitrage strategy peer groups were excluded to focus on long-term investment vehicles that align with broader financial planning goals)

The following best-performing mutual funds are shown with total return, expense ratio and AUM and  metrics to showcase recent trends and shifts. All performance data is standardized to ensure comparability across funds and lookback periods.

Click to jump to a section:

• Best-Performing Mutual Funds in the Last Year
• Best-Performing Mutual Funds in the Last 3 Years
• Best-Performing Mutual Funds in the Last 5 Years
• Best-Performing Mutual Funds in the Last 10 Years
• What Was the Growth of $10,000 Over the Last 10 Years?

Best Performing Mutual Funds in the Last Year

These are the top-performing mutual funds over the past year as of August 31, 2025.

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Best Performing Mutual Funds in the Last 3 Years

These are the top-performing mutual funds on an annualized basis between September 1st, 2022 and August 31, 2025.

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Best Performing Mutual Funds in the Last 5 Years

These are the top-performing mutual funds on an annualized basis between September 1, 2020 and August 31, 2025.

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Best Performing Mutual Funds in the Last 10 Years

These are the top-performing mutual funds on an annualized basis between September 1, 2015 and August 31, 2025.

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What Was the Growth of $10,000 in the Top ETFs Over the Last 10 Years?

If you invested $10,000 10 years ago into any of the ten best-performing mutual funds over the last 10 years, your balance today would be no less than $77K.

The best-performing mutual fund in the last 10 years was the Fidelity Advisor Semiconductors Fund, of which share class “I” (FELIX) posted the best total return performance. A $10,000 investment into FELIX 10 years ago would be worth about $125K today. Behind this group of four Fidelity Advisor Semiconductors Funds was the Fidelity Select Semiconductors Portfolio mutual fund (FSELX); investing $10,000 into FSELX back in 2015 would’ve turned into nearly $95K.

All ten best-performing mutual funds over the last ten years are in the Science & Technology peer group, which has benefitted greatly from the multi-year boom in tech sector stocks.

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Disclaimer

©2025 YCharts, Inc. All Rights Reserved. YCharts, Inc. (“YCharts”) is not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (or with the securities regulatory authority or body of any state or any other jurisdiction) as an investment adviser, broker-dealer or in any other capacity, and does not purport to provide investment advice or make investment recommendations. This report has been generated through application of the analytical tools and data provided through ycharts.com and is intended solely to assist you or your investment or other adviser(s) in conducting investment research. You should not construe this report as an offer to buy or sell, as a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or as a recommendation to buy, sell, hold or trade, any security or other financial instrument. For further information regarding your use of this report, please go to: ycharts.com/about/disclosure.