Putnam Investments: Ratings, if not returns

If you're going to buy stocks (which most people still seem to think they have to do), then Putnam Investments would like you to buy their stock mutual funds.

And if you're thinking of buying Putnam stock mutual funds, they'd prefer you look at their Lipper ratings rather than their performance and it's easy to understand why as shown below from yesterday's WSJ ad, the performance data (via Yahoo! Finance) added by yours truly.
Of course, instead of paying management fees for Mr. Thakore's and Mr. Ewing's hard work and taking a loss, you could have had positive returns over the last 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10-year spans by simply leaving your money in Certificates of Deposit or money market accounts.

But, they'd probably prefer you stick with stocks...

Here's the whole ad along with the respective improvement in Lipper ratings and performance thru June 30th (see PVOYX, PGRWX, PINOX, PEYAX, PNRAX, and POGAX).

Click to enlarge

If this is "some of the finest investment talent" and these are the results that this talent produces, I'd hate to see what other companies' mutual fund performance looks like.