But UMB Scout boasts an excellent lineup of six funds, ranging from the two we cover below to small-cap stocks, bonds and three money market offerings. All boast excellent management teams and have weathered the current economic climate well, though not without taking a few knocks along the way.

Oddly enough, it took the worst bear market in generations to bring the UMB family of funds the recognition it deserves, despite the solid performances its funds have churned out over the past few years.

At first blush UMB Scout International (UMBWX) appears a fairly typical international fund, but what sets this offering apart from the crowd is where management doesn’t invest. Ivy-League educated lead manager Jim Moffett has conspicuously avoided the Chinese market for years. Believing that shareholder protections in China are too weak, Moffett remained on the sideline during the country’s bull market rally in 2006 and 2007; although the fund returned more than 21 percent in 2006, it subsequently fell to almost the bottom of its category while its competitors reaped the gains.

But that decision paid dividends in 2008 when the Shanghai Index plunged a gut-wrenching 65 percent; even though UMB Scout International lost just over 38 percent in the course of the year, it finished out 2008 in the top six percent of its category. It also beat out its benchmark, the MSCI EAFE Index, by a respectable 5.9 percent.

The fund was also helped along by Moffett’s light exposure to financials last year as well as his decision to overweight consumer staples. It did have one notable blowup in the banking sector, hanging on to Anglo Irish Bank as share prices plunged amidst steep loan losses.

Going forward we expect the fund’s performance to hold up, particularly given Moffett’s top-down approach to stock selection. He and his team first examine the macroeconomic climate as well as the political situations in the countries in which it invests, and then disqualify any companies that have been in existence for at least three years.

Moffett also has the option of investing as much as 20 percent of assets in fixed-income securities such as bonds or preferreds, though he rarely exercises it.

Although we expect Moffett’s aversion to China to drag on returns in 2009, investors would be hard-pressed to find a better international growth and income fund. With an expense ratio of just 0.96 percent (the average is 1.48 percent) and a current yield of 2.3 percent, UMB Scout International makes an excellent long-term holding.

Technically a growth and income fund, UMB Scout Stock (UMBSX) has focused a bit more on growth as of late and currently yields just 0.8 percent. But former attorney and lead manager James Reed has a history of generating healthy returns without hefty yields; during the fund’s best years, the income component played a minor role in its overall performance.

By overweighting healthcare and consumer goods and underweighting financials versus its historical norms, Scout Stock finished 2008 in the top 3 percent of the large-blend pack. It also held historically large stakes in software companies such as Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL), an industry where earnings have held up much better than expected.

On a year-to-date basis the fund is underperforming the S&P 500, its benchmark, by about two percent, but that’s primarily because of its limited exposure to the aggressive rally in financial stocks. But given Reed’s combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches–top-down to identify attractive sectors and then bottom-up to select individual companies–coupled with strong fundamental analysis, the fund should continue to outperform this year.