3 Gold-Medal Mutual Funds to Buy Now

Mutual funds are among the most useful tools in the investor tool belt.

Tens of millions of Americans invest their money every year. Most of them don't have the time, energy, experience, and/or desire to spend countless hours researching hundreds or thousands of stocks and bonds, determine which ones are the best fits for their portfolios, buy them, then manage those positions over time. And most certainly don't have the money it would take to buy all the individual stocks and bonds you'd need to put together a truly diversified portfolio.

Mutual funds take all of those bricks off your shoulders, saving you time and allowing you to spend a fraction of the money with just a couple clicks.

Today I'll help. Read on as I look at some of the market's best mutual funds right now.

Disclaimer: This article does not constitute individualized investment advice. Individual securities, funds, and/or other investments appear for your consideration and not as personalized investment recommendations. Act at your own discretion.

How Were the Best Mutual Funds Selected?

I start virtually every review of investment funds by booting up Morningstar Investor and running a quality screen I customize for each article. 

Here, I began my search by seeking out only mutual funds that have earned a Gold Morningstar Medalist rating*. Morningstar has two ratings systems—the Star ratings and the Medalist ratings. The latter are a forward-looking analytical view of a fund. Per Morningstar:

"For actively managed funds, the top three ratings of Gold, Silver, and Bronze all indicate that our analysts expect the rated investment vehicle to produce positive alpha relative to its Morningstar Category index over the long term, meaning a period of at least five years. For passive strategies, the same ratings indicate that we expect the fund to deliver alpha relative to its Morningstar Category index that is above the lesser of the category median or zero over the long term."

As I've written in other Young and the Invested articles, a Medalist rating doesn't mean Morningstar is necessarily bullish on the underlying asset class or categorization. It's merely an expression of confidence in the fund compared to its peers. 

Related: The 10 Best Dividend Funds You Can Buy Now

To narrow the list further, I also required the following:

• No loads: In addition to annual expenses, some funds charge additional fees, including "loads." For instance, if you invested $10,000 in a mutual fund with a 5% front-end load, the mutual fund provider would immediately take $500 out in fees. So, you'd already be starting behind the 8-ball, investing just $9,500 to start with. The funds here have no sales charges.
• Reasonable investment minimums: The maximum investment minimum for inclusion is $3,000. But only one fund on this list requires that much to start. Most require between $1,000 and $2,500, and a few funds have zero investment minimums. Also, some fund providers explicitly lay out lower investment minimums for specific accounts, such as individual retirement accounts (IRAs). T. Rowe Price, for instance, has $2,500 minimum initial investments on many of its funds, but lowers that minimum to $1,000 when investing through an IRA.
• Broad availability: Many mutual funds have several share classes, many of which are limited to certain types of accounts, like, say, only for 401(k)s or only for wealth management clients. All funds here are Investor-class or other shares that are generally considered to be widely available to retail investors.

From the much more manageable resulting list, I've selected a group of mutual funds that provide a wide array of core and tactical strategies, ensuring there's at least one fund, if not many funds, for just about everyone.

* All mutual funds on this list had a Gold Medalist rating as of their selection. Funds will remain on the list as long as they maintain a minimum of Silver. Funds that fall below this threshold will be replaced.

Related: 8 Best Stock Portfolio Tracking Apps [Stock Trackers]

3 Top Mutual Funds to Buy Now

The following represent some of the best mutual funds you can buy at the moment—and they're priced quite reasonably too. 

While annual expense ratios weren't used explicitly in the selection process, the vast majority of these funds sport below-category-average fees. It makes sense, too: Fees eat into a fund's performance, so providers that charge onerous management expenses are, in a way, handicapping their fund's returns. Meanwhile, providers with lower fees get a bit of an intrinsic performance edge.

Lastly, this isn't a ranking of the best funds. Every fund on here rates as excellent already.

The following are a handful of selections from our fuller list of the 13 best mutual funds to buy now.

1. T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth Fund

• Style: U.S. large-cap dividend-growth stock
• Assets under management: $23.6 billion
• Dividend yield: 0.9%
• Expense ratio: 0.64%, or $6.40 per year for every $1,000 invested
• Minimum initial investment: $2,500
• Morningstar Medalist Rating: Gold

If you’d prefer a large-cap “blend” fund (a mix of value and growth, like the S&P 500) that’s actively managed, you can look to one of T. Rowe Price’s best mutual funds: T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth Fund (PRDGX).

Dividend funds are not all built the same. Some expectedly prioritize a higher-than-average level of equity income. But some, like PRDGX, focus more on dividend growth, where its components' payouts increase over time, than headline yield.

Related: 8 Best High-Yield Dividend Stocks: The Pros' Picks for 2026

What’s the appeal? Well, even dividend stocks with a low yield right now can deliver a higher “yield on cost” down the road. Yield on cost is what you're actually earning based on the price at which you bought the stock. (Example: A $100 stock paying $1 in annual dividends yields 1%. But because you bought the stock at $50, your yield on cost is 2%.)

Also, dividend-growth stocks tend to be high-quality equities. After all, you can't sustainably increase how much cash you're shelling out to shareholders if you're unable to turn a profit—you need strong financials and excellent cash flows. So dividend growth is often considered a quality screen of sorts that ensures the fund owns a higher grade of company.

That's what you get with PRDGX. "[Manager Tom] Huber targets financially healthy companies capable of sustaining above-average payout growth, believing dividend growers offer attractive returns with lower volatility," Morningstar Senior Analyst Stephen Welch says about this Gold-rated fund. 

But one thing to note: Huber is tasked with building a portfolio of companies "that have a strong track record of paying dividends or that are expected to increase their dividends over time." I emphasize "or" because it's … well, different. 

Related: 7 Best High-Dividend ETFs for Income-Hungry Investors

Many dividend-growth index funds are required, thanks to the rules that govern the index, to own companies that have improved their payouts without interruption for some set period of time. That's not the case with T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth. Huber has full discretion here. For instance, holding Ross Stores (ROST) actually suspended its distribution for a few quarters in 2020—and was booted from the Dividend Aristocrats as a result. However, it resumed payouts in 2021 at its previous level and has raised each year since then, so it's certainly a dividend grower once more.

For the most part, however, this U.S.-centric portfolio of about 90 holdings is full of blue-chip stocks such as Visa (V), Chubb (CB), and Walmart (WMT) that boast solid dividend-growth histories.

The actively managed T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth ETF (TDVG) offers similar exposure and charges 0.50% annually.

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2. Primecap Odyssey Aggressive Growth Fund

• Style: U.S. all-cap growth stock
• Assets under management: $7.8 billion
• Dividend yield: 0.3%
• Expense ratio: 0.66%, or $6.60 per year for every $1,000 invested
• Minimum initial investment: $2,000
• Morningstar Medalist Rating: Gold

Primecap Odyssey Aggressive Growth Fund (POAGX) is a supreme example of the advice to "look under the hood" before you buy a mutual fund.

This is a fund that has the words "aggressive growth" in the name, and that is categorized as a mid-cap growth fund. However …

1. POAGX isn't an "aggressive growth" fund—at least not right now. While it's true that POAGX's management aims to own companies with "prospects for rapid earnings growth," its actual holdings aren't as aggressively "growthy" as comparable products. "The fund has recently tilted more toward the core column of the Morningstar Style Box as many of its holdings' growth rates and valuation ratios have declined in recent years, and the managers have been unwilling to chase benchmark stocks they think are overvalued," says Morningstar Principal Robby Greengold.

2. POAGX isn't really a mid-cap growth fund, either. The fund's page itself says the company "has historically invested significant portions of its assets in mid- and small-capitalization companies," and "may invest in stocks across all market sectors and market capitalizations." There's nothing strictly tethering this fund to mid-caps. In fact, it currently boasts a pretty balanced 40/30/30 blend of large-, mid-, and small-cap stocks.

Fortunately, you're still left with an awfully useful fund.

Related: 7 Space ETFs for the Next Frontier of Investing

Primecap Odyssey Aggressive Growth and its team of managers own about 175 stocks across the market-cap spectrum, with an eye for growth. Each manager oversees a separate "sleeve" of selections, while a few picks are made by other analysts.

As is common with actively managed funds, size isn't everything when it comes to allocations. Yes, top holdings include mega-caps like Micron (MU), Nvidia (NVDA), and Alphabet (GOOGL) ... but they also include companies like $6 billion Rhythm Pharmaceuticals (RYTM) and $38 billion BeOne Medicines (ONC) that would never see daylight in a cap-weighted index fund.

The proof is in the performance pudding. POAGX is in the top 20% of all category funds by performance over the trailing three-, five-, and 10-year periods, and the top 5% over the trailing 15 years.

Again, past performance isn't indicative of future returns, but management has a track record of going anywhere within the U.S. market-cap spectrum and finding gold. And that makes Primecap's product one of the best mutual funds to buy in 2026.

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Learn More About These and Other Funds With Morningstar Investor

If you're buying a fund you plan on holding for years (if not forever), you want to know you're making the right selection. And Morningstar Investor can help you do that.

Morningstar Investor provides a wealth of information and comparable data points about mutual funds and ETFs—fees, risk, portfolio composition, performance, distributions, and more. Morningstar experts also provide detailed explanations and analysis of many of the funds the site covers.

With Morningstar Investor, you'll enjoy a wealth of features, including Morningstar Portfolio X-Ray®, stock and fund watchlists, news and commentary, screeners, and more. And you can try it before you buy it. Right now, Morningstar Investor is offering a free seven-day trial and a discount on your first year's subscription when you use our exclusive link.

3. Dodge & Cox Income Fund

• Style: Intermediate-term core-plus bond
• Assets under management: $107.7 billion
• SEC yield: 4.3%*
• Expense ratio: 0.41%, or $4.10 per year for every $1,000 invested
• Minimum initial investment: $2,500
• Morningstar Medalist Rating: Gold

Most investors need some exposure to bonds, which is debt that's issued by governments, companies, and other entities. Their interest payments and relative lack of volatility make them an excellent tool for providing a portfolio with stability and income.

But how much bond exposure you need will vary by age—because they're better at protecting wealth than growing it, people typically start with little in the way of bond holdings earlier in life, then gradually hold more bonds as they get closer to (and into) retirement. (Purpose-built investment products called target-date funds capture this dynamic automatically for investors.)

Individual bonds can be a hassle. Data and research on individual issues is much thinner than it is for publicly traded stocks. And some bonds have minimum investments in the tens of thousands of dollars. But you can blunt these problems by purchasing a bond fund, which allows you to invest in hundreds or even thousands of bonds with a single click—and, in many cases, very low fees.

Bond funds like Dodge & Cox Income Fund (DODIX) are, ahem, the gold standard.

DODIX is referred to as a "core-plus" bond fund, which means it can hold not only several types of core debt categories, but also noncore categories such as below-investment-grade (aka junk) corporate bonds and emerging-markets debt.

Related: 10 Monthly Dividend Stocks for Frequent, Regular Income

While this Dodge & Cox fund is allowed to pursue "below-investment-grade debt, debt of non-U.S. issuers, and other structured products," it's not doing much of that at the moment. Currently, more than half of assets are invested in securitized debt, 28% is allocated to mostly investment-grade corporates, 14% goes to Treasuries, and the rest is scattered other government-related bonds. Across all of that, DODIX does hold a little international debt, and about 5% of the portfolio is junk-rated, but past that, it's more "core" than "core-plus"—but it's an opportunistic fund, so that could change at any time.

Duration, a measure of interest-rate sensitivity, is 6.1 years. While the actual calculation is much more complex, this basically implies that for every 1-percentage-point increase in interest rates, DODIX would decline by 6.1% in the short term, and vice versa. It's a moderate amount of risk, nothing more.

Past that, Dodge & Cox Income has beaten its category average and its benchmark index—the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index (the "Agg"), arguably the market's most prominent broad bond index—in every meaningful time period. It's also among the top 20% or better of all category funds over the trailing one-, five-, 10-, and 15-year periods.

* SEC yield reflects the interest earned across the most recent 30-day period.

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