NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Mark Hurley likes to say his managers are the ones who used to get beaten up on the playground as kids.
The stock pickers at Hurley's Undiscovered Managers Funds are veterans of institutional investing, many with doctorates and book credits, who are now beating up their peers on the performance charts, he said.
"They're brilliant guys but they're not great game show hosts," said Hurley, president and chief executive.
Also in this column: A look at a new index fund that tracks the Dow Jones global titans index.
The Undiscovered Managers International Small Cap Fund is up 35.76 percent this year as of Wednesday, putting it among the top 10 international stock funds tracked by Morningstar.
Nine of the 11 funds are performing better than their competition, Hurley said. Even funds in sectors that are out of favor have reason to be proud, he said. For example, Undiscovered Managers REIT Fund may be down 11 percent in the last two years, but other funds in the category are down about 40 percent in that time, he said.
All of the managers have managed big pools of money for companies like Boeing (BA: Research, Estimates), Chrysler, and International Paper (IP: Research, Estimates).
Among the managers are Russell Fuller and Fred Stanske of Fuller & Thaler Asset Management. Hurley said they are pioneers in behavioral finance investing, which analyzes the impact of emotions and mental errors by investors that cause stocks to be overvalued or undervalued.
The Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Growth Fund is up 14.66 percent year to date, he said.
"Most people chase mutual funds that have the best returns, so they're buying high and they're going to sell low," Hurley said. "You want a manager who stays in his asset class and does well against his peers."
Many managers on the institutional side of Wall Street want to offer mutual funds, but find it financially impractical, Hurley said. Undiscovered Managers provides the marketing and capital for them to do it.
"For the managers, it's like another private account," Hurley said. A West Point graduate, he was a managing director at Merrill Lynch before founding Undiscovered Managers.
Investors can buy the funds through financial advisers, broker-dealers and in some 401(k) plans, Hurley said.
Investors looking to diversify their domestic stock portfolio may be interested in a new fund that tracks some of the world's largest and well-known blue-chip companies.
The E*Trade Global Titans Index Fund, which opened Feb. 18 to investors who have an online account with E*Trade Group (EGRP: Research, Estimates), is the first U.S. no-load mutual fund that tracks the Dow Jones global titans index (DJGT), said Michael Petronella, managing director of Dow Jones Indexes.
As the name implies, the Dow Jones global titans index consists of 50 of the world's largest companies, such as U.S.-based Microsoft (MSFT), Germany's Deutsche Telecom AG (DT) and Japan's Toyota Motor ADS (TM).
"It's the biggest of the big, bluest of the blue (chip companies)," Petronella said of the index.
So the new E*Trade fund, which will attempt to match the index, is for investors looking to participate in the growing global economy who want to diversify their portfolio, David Moore of E*Trade Funds said.
Because the U.S. economy has had such tremendous growth and outperformed most European and other overseas markets last year, Petronella added, more than 60 percent of the Dow Jones global titans index is comprised of U.S.-based companies, such as General Electric Co (GE: Research, Estimates), IBM (IBM: Research, Estimates) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT: Research, Estimates) Inc.
Companies in the index, which was introduced in July 1999, are chosen by their market capitalization, earnings, revenues and other factors. All of the companies are currently larger than $20 billion in market cap.
The Dow Jones global titans index is down 9.93 percent year to date as of Feb. 24, according to Dow Jones Indexes. Using an historical method, the index's annual return is 14.4 percent as of 1999.
Investors who redeem shares in the E*Trade Global Titans Fund within four months of purchase will pay a 1 percent redemption fee. However, they pay no sales commissions or transactions fees. The fund's annual expense ratio is 0.60 percent.
To help keep the expenses low, shareholders must agree to receive all information about the E*Trade Global Titans Fund electronically instead of by traditional mail, according to the fund's prospectus. The minimum investment for a standard account is $1,000 and $250 for an IRA account. 
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