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Mutual Funds Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly considering the enormous market for mutual funds, information available on the Internet is tainted by an over abundance of poor quality, over priced commercial sites, generally aimed at touting some method for mutual fund investing. There are, indeed, some excellent sources of information provided for a fee, but the sites that provide high quality, free data and content are few and far between. Consequently, we will be very selective in the few sites we reference. There used to be four major providers of mutual fund performance data: CDA/Wiesenberger, Lipper, Morningstar and Standard & Poor's/Micropal. All four data gatherers still exist, but their methods of delivering information have changed. Morningstar can be accessed directly on the web, but most of the information is not free. Lipper can be reached directly but its retail mutual fund information is available through Reuters. Standard & Poor's still publishes individual mutual fund reports, available for a charge on the S&P Outlook Online site. There is also a fund site, Funds-SP.com, developed by Micropal. The site is constantly under development and is quirky but has great potential. Some of the information is not free. Most of the comprehensive investment sites have a area dedicated to mutual funds. Content is usually divided between general information, analysis of individual funds and search screens. Broad content can be found at: BusinessWeek Online, CNN/Money, Forbes, MarketWatch, Morningstar and Yahoo! Finance. To analyze individual funds, use these links: CNN/Money, Forbes, Kiplinger, MarketWatch, MSN MoneyCentral, Reuters, SmartMoney, Yahoo! Finance and Zacks. Keep in mind that all of the statistical data comes from only three sources: Lipper, Morningstar and S&P. The separate sites simply arrange the information differently. To find mutual fund screens go to: BusinessWeek Online, CNN/Money, Forbes, Kiplinger, Morningstar, MSN MoneyCentral, Reuters, Yahoo! Finance, and Zacks. In screening for mutual funds, you may want to review our commentary, "Risk Adjusted Mutual Fund Performance." Virtually all public mutual funds have their own Web site where additional information can be obtained. You can almost always download a current prospectus and often the very important additional filing called the statement of additional information (SAI), as well as available annual and quarterly reports. Often compact fund fact sheets and commentary from fund managers are also available. Elsewhere on our site, we have provided direct links to the sites of mutual funds currently used or recommended by Financial Counselors of Virginia. National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) has a detailed mutual fund expense analyzer and a breakpoint search tool. StyleTrac.com: Provided free by a developer of institutional asset allocation and investment analysis software, the site affords advanced style analysis and performance measurement. An extraordinary site. Journal of Indexes offers an extremely detailed screening tool for index funds and ETFs at IndexUniverse. RiskGrades: offers no less than a single standardized measure of volatility to provide a comparison of broad investment risk across the world's financial assets. Developed in the mid-1990s by JP Morgan, a global investment bank, the service is offered free to give individual investors a reliable way to measure market risk. Registration and a certain amount of thought and effort is required, but it is well worth it. A truly outstanding site. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) offers a simple mutual fund total cost calculator. There are other such calculators out there but this one is free and from a reliable source. Are mutual fund managers worthy of their hire? Is it more rewarding simply to invest in index funds? Investors constantly face such questions. Standard & Poor's Index Versus Active site attempts to provide an accurate and objective apples-to-apples comparison of funds' performance versus their appropriate style indices, and does so on a quarterly basis. In trying to answer the questions, investors come face to face with the age old debate between proponents of active and passive investing. Two opposing views are spelled out in Difficulty of Selecting Superior Mutual Fund Performance and Investing in Mutual Funds When Returns Are Predictable. FundAlarm helps you decide when it's time to sell a fund, instead of when it's time to buy. According to the site, "We try to shine a light in the darker corners, and poke holes in balloons that could use some poking." Not your run-of-the-mill mutual fund site! There are more books written about mutual funds
than just about any other topic in investing, the vast majority of which should
be avoided at all costs! Among the exceptions that are well worth reading are
John Bogle's
Common Sense on Mutual Funds , Gary Gastineau's
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