Among the scores of Money Talk Videos that Landaas & Company has produced to help individuals better understand investing, a number have covered various aspects of owning mutual funds.
Mutual funds pool investors’ money to share investment diversification and to spread out cost and risk through professional management. Below are suggestions for learning more about mutual funds, with links to videos. View them in the order suggested or skip around.
(To view the entire Mutual Fund 101 series on YouTube, please click here.)
- Mutual Fund 101: An introduction – Mutual funds offer affordable, diversified, professionally managed investments used as building blocks for balanced portfolios.
- Talking Money: Allocation – Investors know to not put all their eggs in one basket. But where you put them makes a big difference in what eventually happens.
- Narrowing the selection of mutual funds – Selecting from more than 8,000 mutual funds relies first on the particular needs of the investor. Then, narrowing it down focuses on three main attributes.
- Sorting through investment fund managers – When selecting actively managed funds, it’s important to know how managers approach the investments they make.
- Understanding your investments: Prospectus – Mutual fund investors are required to get a prospectus for a reason. Here are suggestions for how investors can make the documents useful.
- How to read a mutual fund prospectus – We illustrate how investors can use a prospectus to learn about a mutual fund’s objectives and key investment strategies, performance, fees and more.
- Making the most of mutual fund fees – While limiting costs can help maximize net results, investors also need to weigh the costs and benefits of expert management for certain parts of their portfolio.
- Know a mutual fund beyond its prospectus – Mutual fund investors can access a variety of other documents to drill into their funds so they can understand and monitor their investments.
- Investment results: Success or luck? – Attribution analysis is a sophisticated way of testing a fund manager’s potential by seeing how much of a fund’s results can be based on the approach of management.
- Style Box: How equities are allocated – Investors need balance broadly between stocks and fixed income – and also within each of those segments. For equities, a style box gives a quick breakdown on size and style.
- Indexes: Low costs, less flexibility – Index funds can provide low-cost exposure to market segments, but they also lock investors into those segments.
Learn more:
Talking Money: Mutual funds, by Adam Baley
Mutual Funds, from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
Mutual Funds: A Guide for Investors, from the Securities and Exchange CommissionTest your knowledge.
Click here for the Mutual Fund 101 Quiz.
(initially posted Feb. 8, 2016; updated April 1, 2016)
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