Roger B. from Sarasota, Fla. is thinking that the economy is about to favor big, dividend-paying stocks again. He wants to put some of his money into a fund that follows the Dogs of the Dow strategy, because he expects that tactic to produce good results over the next two years.

What he learned is that there is just one fund dedicated to the Dogs of the Dow, the Payden Value Leaders fund, and it’s enough of a dog in its own right to earn the distinction of Stupid Investment of the Week. For an investor on the outside looking in, it’s hard to see the attraction of this fund.

To see why that is, you have to start by understanding what the fund is supposed to do.

Payden Value Leaders is supposed to invest in the Dow dogs. This is a simple investment strategy that has some merit.

It works like this: On the first trading day of the year, buy the 10 highest-yielding stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average, putting an equal amount of money into each stock. Hold the portfolio until the end of the year, then you rebalance your holdings so you have the updated list of the 10 top-yielding stocks in the index.

Over the last decade the strategy would have yielded an annualized average return in the double digits, which seems great until you realize that it has lagged the Standard & Poor’s 500 index by about a full percentage point per year.

The basics behind the strategy are simple: You get big-name, blue-chip stocks at a discount. They pay you a decent dividend, and as they grow into their market value, you profit along the way.

The original Dogs of the Dow strategy is actually not a bad one, says Mark Hulbert of the Hulbert Financial Digest, a MarketWatch-owned publication that tracks the performance of investment newsletters. It has discipline, it’s simple, and if you stick with it and don’t tinker with it, you’ll end up with a diversified portfolio that should do well.

The problem, however, is that the Payden fund tinkers with the system.

To be considered a diversified investment, a mutual fund must hold a minimum of 16 securities. Although there are funds that are labeled as non-diversified, Payden didn’t go that route. So it holds the Dow dogs and supplements that by investing in various exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.

For that additional management it charges an expense ratio of 0.80 percent. But the low figure is a bit misleading. Because management effectively is following a script, costs could be much lower. The underlying ETF portion of the portfolio could be purchased directly at a fraction of the cost, and the Dow dogs strategy rebalances less than, say, the Russell 2000 index, and has far fewer stocks, so it should be priced as cheaply as most small-cap index funds. It isn’t.

The mix of Dow dogs with other investments hasn’t proven particularly successful on the Payden fund. For the last three years the fund has fallen far short of actually capturing the return that an ordinary Dow dogs strategy would have delivered.

Given the ease of constructing a Dow dogs portfolio, it’s hard to believe the average investor wouldn’t be better off just doing it on her own, without a mutual fund.