Mutual fund
Investment Choice: REIT
Why you want to invest in REIT? As historical performance shows, investing in real estate can improves diversification of your portfolio and give you better return and lower risk over the long term.
In my previous discussions on building portfolios with ETFs (the last segment can be found here), we have seen REIT (real estate investment [...]
March 2007 Score Card — Part II: Asset Allocation
Two months ago, I took a look at the asset allocation of my taxable mutual fund investment. A result of that review was the decision to sell on of the large-cap holdings, CSVFX, as I found my investments didn’t have enough exposure in the mid- and small-cap categories. CSVFX was unloaded in February and part [...]
Time to Dump American Century?
I have been investing with American Century Equity Income Fund (TWEIX) for quite some time. First I had it in my taxable account, then added to my wife’s Roth IRA. But now it seems the time will soon come to dump it completely.
Morningstar reported that the fund company is planning to shake up its fund [...]
How to Use Morningstar to Research Mutual Funds
Morningstar is my choice for mutual fund research because it provides a broad array of data for me to analyze a fund in cost, return, and risk. This post is to discuss what kind of information I will consider when evaluating a mutual fund.
If you already have a specific fund on your mind and want [...]
Mutual Fund Basics: Asset Allocation Funds and Balanced Funds
I am starting an irregular Mutual Fund Basics series where I will discuss some basic concepts in mutual fund investing. Though I have a larger portion of my taxable investments in stocks than mutual funds, I feel I know mutual funds better than stocks (and yes, I am still learning). Actually, I already have a [...]
Understanding M*’s Mutual Fund Risk Measures: Alpha, Beta, and R-squared
Morningstar is the my primary website for mutual fund research. When I look for a mutual fund investment (mostly actively managed funds), not only I am concerned with a fund’s past performance and costs, but its risk factors as well. Before getting into the details, let’s first see how risk is defined in finance.
According to [...]
Firstrade to Start Charging Fees for Mutual Fund Investments
I got this email from Firstrade today, but somehow the date of the message shows February 7, 2007. While the message began with an exciting tone by saying “We are pleased to announce that Firstrade now offers over 10,000 mutual funds,” What it really wants to tell me, as well as all other investors [...]
Lifecycle Funds: Does One Size Fit All?
Lifecycle funds (or target-date funds), are gaining popularity these days and become an ideal vehicle for retirement savings for people who don’t have the time or knowledge to do their own research in selecting funds to build a well diversified portfolio. With lifecycle funds, the biggest advantage is automatic asset allocation. By investing in a [...]
Mutual Fund Portfolio Checkup
It has been more than a year since I reshuffled my mutual fund portfolio in 2005 when I dumped two small-cap funds and one bond fund. The only new fund I added in the past two years is ADVDX. Currently, I have a dozen funds in my taxable accounts and the asset allocation is as [...]
Total Return and Investor Return Explained
Back in last October, Morningstar started to offer a new gauge to measure how average investors fared over a certain period of time when investing in open-end mutual funds or ETFs. The new gauge is called Investor Return, also known as dollar-weighted return, which takes into account the total cash inflows and outflows. Before, Morningstar [...]
