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Sunday, December 24, 2017

Alpha Teach Yourself Investing in 24 Hours: An Analysis (part 44)

Picking a Mutual Fund (part A)
by
Charles Lamson



Performance Indicators

Past performance is no guarantee of future success. That is more than a warning from the regulators. It is an absolute truth. Yesterday's hero is today's failure. Basing a decision to buy a fund on past performance only is not much better than flipping a coin.


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JUST A MINUTE
Past performance of a mutual fund is no guarantee of future success, but it will pick out the turkeys real quick.

Past performance can tell something about the management of the fund. Wild swings in performance, especially when there is no apparent reason, can signal problems you should avoid. Get to know the manager(s). Their biographies are in the prospectus. A new manager may mean a large turnover in assets, triggering capital gains distributions.

While past performance will not predict future winners, it is pretty good at picking continual losers. Avoid funds that have histories of poor performance.

Looking at a fund's performance is more useful if you can compare it to some objective standard. This is why measuring performance against some of the leading market indicators, like the S&P 500, is so popular.

This process has some advantages and some disadvantages. The advantages include easy access to the indicators whether it is the S&P 500 or the Russel 2000 or one of the other generally accepted market indicators.

That can also be a disadvantage if the fund is compared to an index that is not reflective of what the fund is about. For example, the S&P 500 is weighted toward large-cap stocks. Comparing it to a small-cap stock mutual fund will yield a distorted picture of the fund, which is what some fund managers want.

It is better to get familiar with the indexes that are reflective of your fund's place in the market.

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TIME SAVER
There are a number of services on the Internet that will recommend which mutual fund to buy. Save yourself some time and make your own decision. How will that save time? By the time we finish this analysis of the book Alpha Teach Yourself Investing in 24 Hours written by Steve Little, you will have all the tools or know where to find them that you will need to make informed decisions. If you have confidence in your decisions, you will not be checking up on your investments every 20 minutes.

Services on the Internet offer ways to compare mutual funds.

Let us walk through the process step-by-step:
  1. You have established, based on your goal of funding your retirement, that the best product at your age and level of risk tolerance is a medium-cap growth fund.
  2. You go to Morningstar.com and use the fund selector to find medium-cap growth funds.
  3. If you want, you can follow Morningstar.com rankings to narrow the choices.
  4. Examine the funds for fees and expenses and any other characteristic you feel is important.
  5. Order a prospectus of your choice. Some funds will let you download a prospectus, while others will mail you one. Confirm the information regarding fees, expenses, and so on.
  6. Buy directly from the management company.  
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Clearly, you can do a whole lot more using the online resources that are available on the Internet than you could accomplish on your own. While it is more cumbersome and time-consuming, it is possible to make your selection using available printed material. You just will not be able to consider as many funds this way.

Your portfolio will obviously consist of more than one mutual fund. How many and what types are topics we will cover in a future post when we discuss asset allocation.

*SOURCE: ALPHA TEACH YOURSELF INVESTING IN 24 HOURS, 2000, KEN LITTLE, PGS. 258-260*

END

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