Not to mention being lucky I bought many of them at the lows, not that everyone would do that.
My problem with funds is that they must rebalance, which might mean selling something good in the long term and buying something bad.
This works for me, not recommended for anybody else. My advisor always tells me I am way too concentrated in utilities, until I point out my unrealized gain and decent return on my investment. Like we have been saying investing strategy should be quite individualized, if you don't want to learn simple is the way to go.
I once had the brilliant idea of funding private high school for my kids (well, partially anyway) with dividends from a Gabelli Utilities Mutual Fund. It was a great idea - for a while. For several years the fund was selling for $9-10 a share but was paying a monthly dividend of $0.07/share. Not bad, right? So, with my goal in mind, I was re-investing the dividends into new shares. Even when the share price fell into the $6-7 range, the dividend remained the same. In hindsight, of course, I should have realized that it was not sustainable. Annnnnnnnd it wasn't. Ultimately they did a reverse two for one split and the dividend was no longer very special - though they do currently pay over 6%. Although it was not really painful - it was really more irritating than anything else; after all it was really just a dividend cut packaged as something else - and I was not too over concentrated in this fund, I still should have been more balanced. At least I learned a good lesson!
Whether you are
too concentrated in utilities is of course a personal decision, and owning a bunch of individual stocks instead of a fund may (should?) keep you more protected - and in the case of utilities, most of them aren't going anywhere. As one gets later in life, owning a bunch of dividend paying stocks/funds/ETFs has always seemed to me like a sound strategy to me. (Others, I am sure will have a different opinion, this is GCMB after all!)
For anyone interested, here's a good story about it:
Gabelli Utilities Fund And The Stealth 50% Dividend Cut: Bad Mojo At A Decent Fund? - Gabelli Utilities Fund (MUTF:GABUX) | Seeking Alpha