With an eye out for the best equity mutual funds on the market, it makes sense that we might want to look at past performance as a way to not only measure up our 2011 Watch List, but to see whether what we say here at the Site really holds any value for our readers. [...]
Information posted on the FDIC website brings the total of bank failures for 2010 to seven. On Friday, January 21, 2010, the FDIC shuttered four additional financial institutions including the Bank of Asheville in Asheville, NC, United Western Bank in Denver, CO, CommunitySouth Bank and Trust in Easley, SC, and Enterprise Banking Company in McDonough, [...]
With General Electric’s (GE) profit up 51%, it stands to reason that yet another feather has been added to the argument that this will be the year that large cap growth mutual funds enjoy tremendous returns. As a staple to many equity funds, GE’s results are more than just about how strong the company itself [...]
Equity mutual fund managers may have acquitted themselves with their performance in 2010, but only after a hung jury of investors deliberated until late in the year. It wasn’t until then that there was any meaningful evidence of outperformance of the indexes for which the managers could make their case that 2010 was a breakthrough [...]
Admittedly, November has started off quite slow here at the Mutual Fund Site. But given some of the recent events that we have seen (historic mid-term elections, the news of more quantitative easing also known as QE2), it seems wise on our part to let the dust settle before we start stirring things up again. [...]
Looking for a strong mutual fund? There is one period that you will take a particular interest in: The three years rolling returns of that mutual fund. When it comes to equity funds, that period is often negative and virtually always unimpressive, and we can thank the 2008 market for that. In some cases, like [...]
Small cap mutual funds have had a great run so far in 2010, representing the best performing group of funds among non-specific funds (e.g. real estate, discretionary, etc.). Good returns attract attention, so it makes sense that investors should be a little more curious about small cap funds. But what distinguishes a good fund from [...]
Small cap funds have been among this year’s top performing mutual funds. They have attracted some interest from equity fund investors who have given up on large cap growth funds. But so have international funds. So the question becomes, what if you put small cap and international together? If you have ever wondered this (most [...]
No question, small cap funds have been on something of a tear. As the one segment that has actually performed among all equity funds, small cap has seen a lot of action over the past year. In fact, many investors have looked to small caps for protection where large cap funds have been unable to [...]
If you were to sit down and survey the best performing domestic equity funds available on the market, you would notice quite quickly that small and mid cap value funds are right there at the top. In fact, these are probably the best performing mutual funds overall. Unlike the performers ahead of the mid cap [...]
One of the key equity areas that investors will have been happy to target over the past year is Value. Value funds, regardless of capitalization, have outperformed growth and blend oriented strategies in each of their categories on a YTD basis. This is something definitely worth noting because one of our Top Mutual Fund Picks [...]
If nothing else, the one thing we hope to have to demonstrated about mutual funds as a whole is that they are not only unique in how they read and surf the waves of the market. And one of the trends we have discovered in many of the different mutual funds explored here at the [...]
The lagging small cap category this year has been the small cap growth category. At the Mutual Fund Site, we decided to take a quick peek at a fund that fell into this category and like the top performers we examined last month, the Marshall Small-Cap Growth Fund (MASCX) is an above-average fund. Rated at [...]
The markets are down, making mutual funds all that much more important for risk averse investors. That is not to say stocks do not have their place, but the reason I love mutual funds so much is because they offer so much diversification (some would argue over-diversification) that risk becomes somewhat limited. So what does [...]
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 [...]
