Online Investing

mutual fund, a common stock fund, was founded in 1924. 1940 saw mutual fund assets reach $500 million and the enactment of the Investment Company Act, which defined the framework for the regulation of the mutual fund industry. It took another...

Mutual Funds Are Here to Stay Excitement aside, mutual funds are more blessing than burden to investors. A mutual fund pools money from investors to purchase stocks, bonds, or other types of investments. Each share in a mutual fund represe...

It Doing your homework before buying is the key to successful investing with mutual funds. Mutual funds don't require as much research as individual stocks before you purchase or while managing your portfolio, but they do require some. Fir...

Index Funds, Anyone? So you want instant diversification, basic asset allocation, low costs, less chance of management shenanigans, and you're content to achieve the long-term average returns in the stock market? You can have all this by p...

You check annual returns for some of your mutual funds, and notice that they never seem to perform as well as other funds or their corresponding stock market indexes. Even worse, a fund might trail most of the other funds in the same category. ...

But how do you determine just how bad the damage is? Some web sites include estimated annual fees and compare a fund's costs to the average for the fund category, but that's just the beginning. The bottom line is how much more money would y...

John Bogle, the mutual fund investing guru, views such managers as no more than short-term speculators, who raise your fund costs an estimated 2 to 3 percent of your fund assets annually through higher brokerage commissions and market impact ...

For investors using taxable accounts, buying and holding makes more sense than ever before. Because distributions of capital gains and dividends are taxable in these accounts, you must pay taxes on all of your distributions, whether you recei...

They just advertise recent short-term returns for their best-performing fund and watch fund investors fall for the oldest trick in the mutual fund book. Buying based on short-term performance is a loser's game, as you buy one fund at the top,...

That rate might be great or lousy compared to current market interest rates, but at least it's guaranteed as long as you hold onto the bond. Bond prices are another story. They move in the opposite direction of interest rates, rising when int...

With more mutual funds available than individual stocks, how can you know which ones are the best? You must hone in on the factors that lead to outstanding performance, such as management tenure, low expenses, past performance, and low portfoli...

Not only are there thousands of them, each with its own objectives, costs, and track record, but fund companies and financial advisors also compete against each other, touting favored funds in print, on the Web, and on TV. Fortunately, free scr...

Compared to stock screens that cost money, the pickings are pitiful for fund investors willing to pay for extra bells and whistles. That's probably because the best free fund screens on the Web are good enough for most investors. But what you...

Tracking broad or narrow sectors of the market, they are the perfect buy-and-hold investment for busy investors. What isn't such a good deal are mutual funds that charge actively managed fund prices for index fund investments. These funds ran...

It's a scandal fit for the tabloids—a crusading district attorney uncovers financial shenanigans, while a clueless regulator looks the other way. But this time, the scandal hit close to home if you're one of the 91 million Americans who hold ...

For many fund investors, lack of time, lack of knowledge, and possibly lack of guts conspire against selling even the worst mutual fund dog. Too many investors cut the tie at the wrong time, whereas others turn to new funds for their investing ...

True, a big part of choosing the best mutual fund is comparing numbers between contenders. However, some answers are found only by reading the fund prospectus and judging for yourself. Because mutual funds represent a collection of stocks, bo...

In addition, many mutual fund companies also provide fund comparison tools to evaluate multiple selections from their fund family or to compare their funds to those of their competitors. Of the tools evaluated here, only one comes with a subs...