Mutual Fund Site

As the riskiest of the different investment fund options, growth mutual funds are also known as equity mutual funds. These types of investments rely almost exclusively on capital appreciation in order to provide investors with returns. In general, the higher the risk the greater the growth should be. However, this is not always the case as the growth fund category encompasses many different sub-categories which themselves have many different sub-categories. Still, growth investment funds are considered the most interesting and exciting, yet also the most misunderstood, which is why the Mutual Fund Site focuses so much content on growth funds.

Some common sub-categories to the growth fund category include the following:

• Equity Mutual Funds. Although equities are the most popular type of security held within growth funds, the broader category can hold a number of other securities, including derivatives, convertible bonds (usually very limited), exchange traded funds (ETFs), commodities and so on.
• Dividend Funds. While capital appreciation is considered the primary objective of the growth fund category, investors are more and more apt to look for dividend paying common equities in order to earn income from their growth-oriented investments. Think of this as a “bonus” to holding equities.
• Small Cap Funds. Considered a specialty category, small cap funds (as well as midcap funds) are considered a sub-category because they are limited to small capitalization equities. These types of investments funds will specialize in specific investment size and can be further specialized by investment style (see below for more about market capitalization categories for equity funds).
• Value Funds. These types of investment funds will typically seek equities that are trading below the average price-to-earnings ratio or price-to-book ratio for a particular market (normally the S&P 500, but when looking at Small Cap Equity Funds, then the Russell 2000 and the S&P 400 MidCap Index for Mid Cap Equity Funds would be the more likely index, etc.).
• Financial Funds. These types of mutual funds will specialize in financial services equities. Less common these days, investors are more likely to invest in mutual funds that are overweight in the financial services sector compared to its peers.

These are just some examples of the different type of growth fund sub categories that investors can find. However, in the interest of keeping things simple and organized at the Mutual Fund Site, we have opted to adopt 6 categories that align well with those at Morningstar.com (they have 9 in comparison, but they are also much bigger than we are and prefer to touch all mutual funds, not just the best mutual funds which is where our focus lies).

About the Six Categories

It is worth mentioning that we are not trying to be vastly “different” than the convention here. Instead, we see our six-grid as a simplification. After all, Morningstar’s 9-grid box adds just one extra layer (blended — which is a cross between the value and growth investment style and does not have a corresponding performance category. Essentially, all we have done here is eliminate the “blended” category because we found that the investment funds we cover are commonly either value oriented or growth.

As such, regardless of a mutual fund’s sub-category (financial funds, dividend funds, resource funds, etc.) we classify each investment fund we review under one of the categories above. In other words, you can now isolate the 40+ best mutual funds on the market (in our view, anyway) by the categories listed here.

The links to those pages are below (you should also find a sub-menu next to the Growth Funds for each): (not yet active)

Large Cap Value Funds

Large Cap Growth Funds

Mid Cap Value Funds

Mid Cap Growth Funds

Small Cap Value Funds

Small Cap Growth Funds

In those rare instances where a Morningstar style box shows a mutual fund as a “blended” fund, we will have made the decision to classify as either Value or Growth depending on its overall risk profile (often, a Morningstar management style box will differ from the investment fund’s portfolio category in these instances). So, we have also listed the equity mutual funds we cover by Fund Family which can be accessed under the Fund Family menu or by clicking here.

Sort By Market Capitalization

In addition to the “boxes” above, we have also created pages that allow investors to view funds according to their three different market capitalization category. For more information about the categories, click the links.

Large Cap Equity Mutual Funds are the least risky of the three market capitalization categories. Investment funds that fit into this category will hold securities that, on average, have a market capitalization greater than $10 Billion… read more.

Mid Cap Equity Mutual Funds are riskier than large cap funds but less risky than small cap funds. Investment funds that fit into this category will hold securities that, on average, have a market capitalization of greater than $2 Billion but less than $10 Billion… read more.

Small Cap Equity Mutual Funds are considered the riskier in terms of their market capitalization. Investment funds that fit into this category will hold securities that, on average, have a market capitalization of less than $2 Billion… read more.

Since the Mutual Fund Site covers less than 50 individual investment funds, we did not elaborate into the Mega Cap and Micro Cap categories, instead placing qualifying securities into the large cap and small cap categories respectively. This not only simplifies things for both the Site Admin team and our readers, but it enables the site’s pages to hold more information (in other words, it is an organization issue, not only a quantity of mutual fund reviews issue).

Sort By Investment Style

In addition to market capitalization and the six broader categories listed above, we also classify investment funds by their overall investment style. These investment styles are typical across the industry are quite simply:

Value Equity Mutual Funds

Growth Equity Mutual Funds

We opted out of the Blended category for the reasons outlined above.

Ultimately, while there are many different growth fund options for investors, we have simplified the complicated process here by sticking strictly to equity mutual funds and classifying each investment fund that we cover into one of the boxes, market cap categories and/or investment style categories listed above. This is particularly helpful for investors who know exactly what they are looking for within their portfolio.