NESTLED IN THE FOOTHILLS

of the Rocky Mountains in Santa Fe, N.M., Thornburg Investment Management has quietly accumulated $43 billion over the last 25 years. Its family of funds six equity and seven bond offerings are some of the best performers in their categories. Being 1,800 miles away from Wall Street obviously hasn't hurt this company.

Yet, every week we wind up cutting Thornburg's equity funds from our screens. That's because, to buy some share classes, investors have to pay what's called a sales load. At Thornburg, its 4.5% of the amount of money they're investing; industrywide, that fee can climb as high as 5.75%. These charges are levied by fund companies, but the money ultimately goes to the advisor or broker who sold you the fund. Basically, it's a roundabout way that investors pay for an advisor's service: Your advisor (hopefully) points you toward a decent fund; the fund company pays him for his hard work and for delivering a new investor. Around eight out of 10 investors purchase funds this way.

Our problem with loads is that they violate our longstanding investment rule of keeping fund fees to a minimum. Think about it this way: If you pay a 5.75% front-end load (a front-end charge is applied at the time you initially invest), your new fund has to post the same returns as a comparable no-load fund, plus overcome that original cost. That's a pretty big hole to climb out of. That said, the load fund universe is too vast to ignore. Indeed, 83% of the funds and share classes in the Lipper database some 17,565 charge a sales load. And that number is increasing all of the time. American Century will soon add a load to 12 of its offerings. Currently, more than half of the two dozen biggest families charge loads.

Although tainted in our minds, load funds aren't all bad. There are some that post returns that put their no-load competitors to shame. This week the SmartMoney.com fund screen focuses solely on them. We started by limiting our contenders to domestic equity mutual funds. But even after we narrowed our list with our usual performance and annual expense criteria, we were still left with 114 funds a testament to how large this group is. Below are the top 24 large-cap and multicap funds.

We have good reason for concentrating on these two categories. The key is to hold one of these funds long enough so that its returns help pay back the load costs you shelled out in the first place (or, in the case of back-end load funds, the costs when you sell). We think the average investor should keep large- and multicap funds for at least five years if not longer versus a sector fund that may just be a short-term gamble. That's plenty of time to recoup your out-of-pocket expenses. "You don't want to be switching every six months," says Jeremy Mitchell, a financial planner with Robert Harding in Sun City, Ariz.

Before you make a load fund purchase, check out its parent company. If your original investment lays a big goose egg then you want to be able to slide into another fund without paying additional fees. You can do that easily at American Funds one of the largest load fund families with 39 offerings to chose from but at smaller firms, you won't have such a wide range of possibilities. "The load is not only buying you the fund it is buying you the family, too," says Daniel Galli, owner of his namesake investment firm in Norwell, Mass. And always make sure there isn't a way you or your advisor can get that load reduced or waived completely. For example, Thornburg will trim its fees depending on how much you invest. American has a share class that waves the load in exchange for a slightly higher expense ratio.

After we finalized our list, we wound up back in Santa Fe. Alex Motola has been running Thornburg Core Growth since 2001. He buys three kinds of growth stocks for his portfolio: fast-rising companies in expanding industries; consistent stalwarts; and, on the fringe, riskier plays that are poised to pop. The portfolio is concentrated with just 36 stocks, which means one bad call could spell trouble. But Motola has proven himself to be a good manager. The fund has returned 15.6% year-to-date, according to Morningstar, and over the trailing five-year period he is tops in his peer group. Major holdings include the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's parent company CME Group, Google and Las Vegas Sands.

The Criteria
The large- and multicap load funds on our list had to be open to new money, require a minimum investment under $5,000 and charge an annual expense ratio of less than 1.5%. In addition, the funds' trailing three- and five-year track records had to be in the top 10% of their categories.