Information on Mutual Funds

There is an incredibly wide variety of information readily available about mutual funds. The daily press coverage available in most newspapers covers the NAVs of mutual funds. The Wall Street Journal, in its Monday issue, reports the NAVs and prices of closed-end funds in one convenient place so that they can all be easily seen.

Popular press magazines regularly discuss, analyze, rank, and even recommend mutual funds. This includes Forbes, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Bloomberg Personal Finance, Money, and so on. The press coverage is continual, extensive, and apparently popular with readers, as there is so much of it. Rest assured if you are looking for information about mutual funds, you have only to pick up these various weekly or monthly popular press sources. One or more is always covering mutual funds in some form or the other.

Of course, a wealth of information is also available on the Internet. Many of the popular press magazines just mentioned have Web sites that include mutual fund information. Other well-known sources include Quicken, Yahoo!, CBS Marketwatch, and Bloomberg.

For in-depth coverage, many investors rely on Morningstar, which has come to be thought of as a major source, if not the primary source, of information about mutual funds. Morningstar supplies in-depth coverage of mutual funds in various formats. At www.morningstar.com you will see such sections as "Fund Research," with several subsections, and "Fund Picks and Pans." You can find a list of funds that meet criteria you specify. There is enough free information at this site to keep you busy but you can also purchase a premium service that provides even more information.

An alternative source of information is The Value Line Mutual Fund Survey. Many investors are familiar with and regularly use The Value Line Investment Survey, which covers some 1,700 common stocks. The Investment Survey is widely available in public libraries, and is heavily used. Value Line is doing something similar with its Mutual Fund Survey. It covers more than 1,400 mutual funds and 600 bond funds, using the resources of some 100 securities analysts. Full-page profiles are provided for the equity funds, and quarter-page profiles are included for the bond funds.

As it does for individual stocks in the Investment Survey, the Mutual Fund Survey ranks every mutual fund using the well-known and respected Value Line ranking system on a scale of one to five, with one being the best. This ranking system is based on proprietary formulas developed by Value Line over time. According to Value Line's claims, over the past seven years, funds ranked with a one have outperformed those ranked with a five by 263 percent.

If you would like to analyze mutual funds on your own computer, there are several ways to do this. For example, you can rank and sort various mutual funds using the Steele Mutual Fund Expert/Kiplinger Special Edition software, an inexpensive package available on the Internet at www.mutualfundexpert.com. With this package you can filter the database in an unlimited number of ways, using filters that are included or those you choose. Numerous variables are included for each fund, such as portfolio turnover rates, expense ratios, return measures, risk measures, and so forth. On a more limited basis, you can screen about 4,000 stock and bond funds for free at the Kiplinger Web site, www.kiplinger.com.