The story tells itself

Last year I opened five test portfolios, each had an opening balance of $10,000. The TD Dividend Growth D-series was easily the best mutual fund investment of the five. The D-series is only available to those with self-directed investment accounts. The perk encouraging investors to use the D-series in the reduce MER compared to say the I-series.

Other than the MER, the two mutual funds are the same. Note how much better the D-series performed compared to the I-series.

The TD Monthly Income D-series performs better than the same fund in the I-series. Thanks to the balanced mix of the fund, it contains a lot of bonds, it tends to be less volatile than the dividend growth fund. It neither climbs as high during good time, nor dives as far down during the bad times.

Read the names of the funds. Clearly the Comfort fund does not deliver much comfort. It did not come anywhere near performing as well as the simple dividend growth fund. And the retirement fund would keep me up nights. It failed to perform. It hardly left the starting gate. The clue that these two might be slugs were the words comfort, retirement and conservative.

If you are going to make real money in the market, you are going to have to take some risks. This means investments like the dividend fund are usually a better bet. You may lose in the short run, but in the end, if you have the guts to hang tough, you should come out far ahead of the conservative competition.

And, one can always mix the funds one buys. Some in a U.S. Index fund, some in the TD Monthly Income to add some bonds and some in the Dividend Fund for income and increased growth. I've done some tests of such mixes and all the tests have performed rather well. In fact, I'm running another one of these tests right now. Come back in six months and I may be posting some of the first  results.