Many studies have discussed mutual funds performance, especially about the persistence of excess returns. Regression is the most common method to be used to research the fund persistence. Dutta (2002) proposes a simpler approach – a direct annual examination of whether a fund beats a market proxy or not, to research the persistence in American mutual fund returns. In this study, authors use a similar methodology to analyse New Zealand growth mutual funds. In addition, a statistically robust method is juxtaposed as a comparison. The study finds that the most of the funds sampled during the period 1996-2003 are unable to better the benchmark of the world index.