ABOUT 70% OF ALL EQUITY-FUND expense ratios increased by an average of 8.2 basis points since the beginning of the financial crisis, according to a report released Friday by Lipper. About a quarter of equity funds hiked their expense ratios by more than 10%. In comparison, total expense ratios for long-term fixed-income funds, including taxable and tax-exempt munis, were mostly unchanged, while money-market funds' expense ratios declined by 3.3 basis points.

Lipper estimates that industry revenue derived from management fees is down about 40%, while total fees collected by the industry are down about 30%.

THERE'S A NEW TEAM of mutual-fund analysts, Standard & Poor's Equity Research, looking to take on industry heavyweight Morningstar.

The S&P team put out one of its first reports Friday, looking at the performance of White Oak Select Growth Fund (WOGSX), managed by James Oelschlager. S&P gives it a five-star rating. The fund, with $329.2 million in assets concentrated in just 22 holdings as of June, gets just two stars from Morningstar.

The fund was ranked in S&P's bottom quartile of performance in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and it fell 41% in 2008 -- in line with its large-cap-growth peer group. But through October of this year, it was up 43%, compared to a 24% gain for rivals.

"If you find appealing…a mutual fund that owns stocks favored by S&P equity analysts, that generated a top-quartile three-year track record, exhibited below- average risk and has low cost factors relative to its peers, then White Oak Select may be worth analyzing further," S&P analysts write.

Morningstar analyst Courtney Goethals Dobrow recently wrote that the fund "has a feast-or-famine risk/reward profile and hasn't delivered over time."

Not surprisingly, Robert Stimpson, a portfolio manager at Oak Associates, doesn't agree. "So much of Morningstar's analysis is backwar