After the Standard & Poor's 500 Index jumped 29.6 percent last year, you might be tempted to jump on the back of 2013's best performing stock mutual funds.

That wouldn't be a good idea, says Mark Hulbert, editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest.

"The evidence is that last year's top performers will lag behind the market in 2014 — if not lose a lot of money," he writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Editor’s Note: New Video: Obama Plans to Redistribute Seniors’ Wealth

"You should instead be focusing on strategies with superior track records over far longer than just the last 12 months. More like 15 years, in fact."

Hulbert looked at a hypothetical portfolio that each Jan. 1 began utilizing the strategy of the investment newsletter tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest that had the best performance over the previous year.

"Over the past two decades, this portfolio would have been a disaster, losing an average 17 percent a year," Hulbert writes.

And why did that approach work so badly?

"One-year performance rankings will almost always be dominated by high-risk strategies that hit it big," he explains. "When they don't pan out, those same strategies also can lose big."

Meanwhile, John Waggoner of USA Today has an interesting take on how to use mutual funds to invest in a contrarian manner.

"Mutual funds are terrible contrarian plays, because bad funds can stay bad for a long time," he writes. "But contrarians can get some ideas by watching the flow of money in and out of funds."

For example, very large funds got that way because of strong performance, Waggoner says. "When you see huge amounts of money flow out of a [big] fund, it's probably not because the manager took stupid pills. Instead, it's because the manager's investment style went out of favor."

Editor’s Note: New Video: Obama Plans to Redistribute Seniors’ Wealth

Related Stories:

• WSJ: CLOs are Back … This Time in Mutual Funds
• Bill Gross' Mistake on Fed Taper Rattles Pimco Mutual Funds