Once a family and financial planner have determined the best financial instrument, it is time to select specific investments to use within the vehicle. For example, establishing a Roth IRA to generate some ‘tax free’ retirement income is only the first step. It will be important to determine how the money within the new account [...]
Nearly a decade ago, David B. Leoper of Wealthcare Capital Management published a well-read paper on asset allocation. In his paper, he argued that diversification alone, which we underline here at the Mutual Fund Site, is not enough to water down the risk attributes of a portfolio. It seemed to me when I first came [...]
It is not easy to find mutual funds that have earned double-digit returns on a year-to-date basis. But it seems that this small cap fund has done just that, earning 12.5% since January 2, 2010 even though its investment strategy might seems a little, well, unique compared to others in its category. But before we [...]
One of the things that a site like the Mutual Fund Site should aim to provide is sufficient analysis of mutual funds. With that in mind, we will endeavor to analyze a couple of mutual funds every week, starting with small cap mutual funds in the month of May 2010. We will post our analysis [...]
It appears that a lot of people who find the Mutual Fund Site are looking for help with investing $10,000. Although we cannot “tell” people how to invest 10,000 dollars, we can certainly help them along in their investment journey, whether through our Free Asset Allocation Model service or our specific fund recommendations like our [...]
When we have so many mutual funds to choose from, we often get lost in some of the irrelevant details. We seem to want to chase the next trend, the biggest or hottest sectors and so on. Bond funds, value funds, dividend funds; we talk about these specific investments right here on our site just [...]
Index funds are a hot topic for mutual fund investors because there is a growing belief that index funds will outperform actively managed funds within their respective categories (e.g. a fund that invests in small cap funds would underperform a small cap index fund). A lot of academic research has been done on this topic [...]
Sifting through the reels of available mutual funds to include in your portfolio is no easy task. Investors are faced with so many options that it is literally very interesting to try to figure out why one person chose one fund and another with the same tolerance for risk, available time and investment objectives chose [...]
Recently, the Mutual Fund Site presented a post about the easiest and smartest investment strategy: investing regularly on an automated contribution plan. This investment strategy is also (or better) known as Dollar Cost Averaging and makes perfect sense when used with mutual funds, whether more-volatile funds that invest in small cap stocks, index funds, or [...]
As an investment strategy, putting $12,000 into a mutual fund today versus spreading that $12,000 over the course of twelve months (or $1,000 per month) is statistically not such a smart move… well, unless of course you invest $12,000 per month or at some kind of regular interval. This has nothing to do with the [...]
While mutual funds by themselves offer tremendous diversification potential within sectors, industries, market capitalization and so on, unless you invest in balanced funds, proper asset allocation is usually only achieved by holding different types of asset classes. Understandably, giving up the potential for aggressive gains in growth funds (which are usually suggested through historical return [...]
Generally speaking there are two school of investment management techniques. One is Tactical and the other is Strategic. The latter involves picking and sticking to a particularly asset allocation model from day one, based largely on risk tolerance, maximum time and investment objectives. In other words, if you have 20 years to invest, you have [...]
Investment management is one of those things that crosses many investment territories, from a basic term deposit laddering strategy to a more complicated mutual fund investment strategy to complex, corporate strategies involving bought deals, derivatives and other exotic investment vehicles. But ultimately, investment management can be broken down into two simple camps: Strategic Investment Management [...]
If you have the problem of not knowing where to invest $10,000, you have a problem that many people would love to have. But not knowing where to invest is not the true problem; it is a symptom of the problem of not knowing enough about investments and the optimal investment vehicles. While some people [...]
Insofar as mutual funds are concerned, balanced funds are those all-encompassing funds that can meet an array of investment management requirements. In many cases, people who are new to investments and want to know where to invest with the least amount of risk while still enjoying an accurately built asset allocation model will start out [...]
