Investment in Mutual Funds

If you don't want to have all your assets in the stock market, that means you'll need to consider either cash or bonds for your portfolio. Many people admit that when it comes to investing in bonds, they don't know where...
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The goal of this article is to introduce each of you to some of the less transparent issues I consider in order to select better funds for an investment portfolio, to help you get better returns with lower costs. For many...
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By now, I am sure that you are familiar with the inverse relationship between bond prices and interest rates. When interest rates go down, as the have the past few years, bond prices go up. When interest rates go up, as...
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Unless things turn around this year, we will have had a declining market in four of the past five years. Many analysts, me included, are predicting that the next 10 years in the market will not be as good as the past 10...
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Americans are investing a greater share of their retirement savings in mutual funds. The number of mutual funds available through employer-sponsored plans continues to increase, and 25% of the $12.9 trillion retirement...
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When you purchase a share of stock, you purchase a piece of a company. When you purchase a share of a mutual fund, you are purchasing a collection of stocks, bonds, and/or other securities with a group of investors. These ...
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With the recent corporate scandals still fresh in investor's minds, where can one turn to invest with relative safety and have the prospect of a good rate of return? Interest rates are still near historic lows, suggesting...
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Mutual funds have become the investment of choice for millions of individual investors. Unfortunately, with a frustrating stock market, international instability and questionable corporate practices, too many people are...
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A study published in the Journal of Financial Research indicated that the fees charged by the average stock fund were unchanged during the 1990s (Mutual Funds, July 2002, page 55). That may have been good news back then, but...
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When my Daddy's car was getting low on gas and he'd roll by a garage that didn't have its fuel prices posted on big signs, he would observe that the reason they weren't displayed was because the owners weren't very proud of...
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If you can't beat them, join them. That's the approach many new stock investors take. The stock portion of their investments consists of only an S&P 500 Index mutual fund. And why not? In past years, mutual funds based on...
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For decades, mutual funds were the favored investment vehicle for the majority of the investing public. The primary reasons for their attractiveness are the simplicity in executing the investment ("all I do is place one...
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Some mutual fund families offer several classes of shares that differ in the way they charge fees to shareholders. Classes A, B, and C are the most common. The front-end "load" typical of Class A funds is a sales charge paid...
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In the 1970s, firms like Vanguard began offering passively managed index funds to U.S. investors. Unlike actively managed funds, index funds don't try to beat the stock market. Instead, they mimic the entire market or...
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If you're not educated on the ABC's, you could end up with a D or an F in portfolio management. The ABC's I'm referring to are the share classes of commission mutual funds. "A" shares are where you pay a commission...
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