Bill Miller's Legg Mason Value Trust fund is slightly ahead of the S&P 500 this year. If he beats the market, it will be the 15th straight year that he has done so.

Beating the market...and Bill Miller: The Quaker Strategic Growth fund has a better track record than the S&P 500 and the Legg Mason Value Trust fund during the past five years.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – Bill Miller and the S&P 500 are neck and neck. But what's this? The broader market has put a head in front. Now wait. Miller is back in the lead!

And down the stretch they come!

With a little less than a month to go in the year, it might take a photo finish to figure out if legendary fund manger Bill Miller will extend his streak of beating the S&P 500 to 15 years in a row.

Through Dec. 1, Miller's Legg Mason Value Trust fund is up 6.7 percent while the S&P 500 has a total return, including dividends, of 6.2 percent. Wow, that's close. Affirmed beating Alydar in the 1978 Belmont Stakes by a nose close.

Several fund experts think Miller will hold on to his edge over the market though. (For more about why he should keep the streak alive, click here.)

But what if the Legg Mason Value Trust falters in December and winds up lagging the S&P 500 this year? Who would take Miller's place as the fund manager with the longest track record of outperforming the S&P 500?

Meet Manu Daftary.

Daftary manages the Quaker Strategic Growth fund, a mostly large-cap stock fund that has beaten the S&P 500 for the past seven years straight. And the fund is up 13.2 percent this year so barring a major collapse, Quaker Strategic Growth should make it eight years in a row.

How has he done it? In some respects, his strategy is similar to Miller's -- i.e. looking for stocks across a wide array of industries as opposed to making big bets on niche sectors. This is not a fly-by-night fund that's lucked out because of one hot area.

But if you dig deeper, Daftary's fund is actually run in a quite different fashion from Miller's.

While Miller tends to make more concentrated bets (nearly half of his fund's assets are in his top 10 holdings), Daftary's largest holding accounts for less than 3 percent of the fund's assets and his top 10 positions account for less than a quarter of the fund's net assets.

"We believe having such a concentrated portfolio is quite risky," said Daftary. "It's better to diversify the portfolio in many names."

This also means that there is more turnover in the fund than in Miller's. Daftary said that he will trim his holdings in a stock, even if he still likes its fundamentals, rather than let the stock become a disproportionately large percentage of the fund's assets.

"There's no harm in taking profits. We will sell a stock if it gets over 5 percent of the fund's assets," he said.

What's more, Daftary, who has been managing the fund since its inception in November 1996, is not a big fan of the tech sector...even though he runs a fund with the word growth in the name. Only 4 percent of his fund is in tech.

Contrast that with Miller, who has sizable stakes in Sprint Nextel (Research), Google (Research), and eBay (Research).

Still, Daftary doesn't have a Warren Buffett-like fear of tech. He said his fund was heavily invested in the sector in 1998 and 1999. And he said he's recently bought shares of Yahoo! (Research) and chip equipment firm Terdayne (Research).

"This is a go anywhere fund," said Daftary. "We go where the values and the earnings are so we don't exclude any industry from our mind set."

Daftary, unlike Miller, has also benefited from the surge in energy stocks this year. Miller has avoided oil stocks but Quaker Strategic Growth lists Apache Corp (Research)., Patterson-UTI (Research) and Cimarex Energy (Research) among its top 10 holdings.

In addition, the Quaker Strategic Growth fund is also allowed to hold on to a large portion of cash (it currently has about 10 percent of its assets in cash) and can even short sell stocks. This makes for an interesting mix, and it's one that obviously has worked for shareholders.

"What's really helped the fund is the ability to raise cash levels when we can't find good ideas," Daftary said.

And the fund has not only beaten the market on a regular basis for the past few years. It's even outperformed Miller's fund lately, with a 3-year annualized returns of 18.5 percent and 5-year return of 6.2 percent, according to Morningstar, compared to a 3-year return of 16.8 percent and 5-year return of 5.3 percent for Legg Mason Value Trust.

Despite Daftary's solid track record, the fund has largely slipped under the mainstream investing radar, which means he has been able to manage his fund with a lot less scrutiny. The Quaker Strategic Growth fund has about $800 million in assets while Miller's fund manages nearly $17 billion.

However, investors that are interested in the fund need to be aware of the fees. The fund's expense ratio is 1.99 percent, compared to an expense ratio of 1.68 percent for Miller's fund. The Quaker Strategic Growth fund also has a 5.5 percent initial load fee, essentially a one-time charge for making a purchase. Miller's fund does not charge a load.

But there are several more funds that, according to fund tracking firm Morningstar, are also riding multi-year winning streaks against the market and are on track to beat the S&P 500 again this year.

Some funds from well-known money management firms that are on pace to finish ahead of the market for a lucky seventh consecutive year include the T. Rowe Price Mid-Cap Growth fund, Royce TrustShares fund, Merrill Lynch Natural Resources fund, the Goldman Sachs Growth Strategy fund and the Janus Mid Cap Value fund.

And the following well-known funds are all primed to outperform the S&P 500 for the sixth straight year: the Sound Shore fund, Dodge & Cox Stock fund, Muhlenkamp fund and Third Avenue Value fund

For a look at winning and losing mutual funds, click here.

For a list at MONEY Magazine's favorite 50 funds, click here.