Mutual Funds are an investment scheme that pools money from many different investors to invest in stocks, bonds, or other assets. Typically, there are thousands (if not millions) of different investors who own shares of that mutual fund, which collectively make up the mutual fund’s holdings.
Mutual funds are also the most popular type of investment schemes to the general public because they are available in retirement accounts like a 401k or IRA, as well as taxable investment accounts. The main advantages of mutual funds are the professional management and the inherit diversification that it provides.
Explanation of How Mutual Funds Work
In simplistic terms, investors buy shares of the mutual fund, and the money is in turn used by the fund manager to invest in some type of assets (for example, stocks). Therefore, investors are in effect buying a share of the underlying asset that the fund purchases when they buy a share of the mutual fund.
At times, the mutual fund will issue more shares to sell to investors to cope with demand. However, some funds may become closed to new investors when its portfolio simply becomes too large to manage. While it can’t be proven, it is interesting to note that many believe that as the size of the fund grows, it eventually comes to a point where returns suffer.
Prices of a Mutual Fund
Much like a stock, the share price of a mutual fund fluctuate. However, unlike the former two where the securities are traded constantly during market hours, the share price of a mutual fund is typically calculated on the end of every business day.
Since orders for mutual funds can only be entered during market hours, it implies most investors won’t know the exact price of the fund until the transactions go through. However, since the share price is highly correlated with the assets that it owns and the volatility is lower than a typical stock, investors generally are not as sensitive about market timing a mutual fund.
Advantages of Owning a Mutual Fund Explained
It’s not popular for no reason. Mutual funds offer many benefits for the average investor:
- Professional Management – Unlike the average investor who probably don’t have time to monitor and research each particular holding, mutual fund managers do this on a full-time basis to maximum returns.
- Simplicity – Mutual funds offer a very simple way for the average investor to invest. This appeals to the buy it and forget it type of investor who still wants to be involved in the market.
- Liquidity – Unlike investment vehicles such as a certificate of deposit, mutual funds are highly liquid. If you really want your investment liquidated, it generally takes only a couple of days to do so.
- Diversification – Since mutual funds own a huge collection of assets, investing in it inherently gives you a diversified portfolio. However, take caution that most mutual funds are sector or class specific, so while there are different types of assets within the portfolio, they are all correlated to each other.
Disadvantages of Mutual Funds
There are many reasons not to like mutual funds as well. Let’s explore a few here:
- Cost – Theoretically, mutual fund managers help increase your returns and reduces your risk. However, many believe that those managers are no better at finding the right investment than you or I. The worst part is that whether they make or lose money, they still take a cut (known as management fees). Other possible fees include: sales charges, administrative fees, marketing expenses. These funds definitely is more expensive than a do-it-yourself approach.
- Tax Implications – Because you do not control the buy and sell of each security, you might be stuck with a tax bill when the fund made money on the sale of some stocks when the whole portfolio has negative return!
- Size of the Fund – Mutual funds control so much money that whenever they decide to buy an asset, they increase the demand so much that they end up having to pay more for the asset. This obviously hurts your return as an investor. Additionally, the fund managers are sometimes forced to buy assets at terrible prices because they have so much money to invest.
- Inflows and Outflows of Money – Fund managers uses the investor’s cash to invest, so the fund is sometimes forced to sell some assets to pay back money to the investors. However, mutual funds usually have the highest redemptions when the fund does extremely bad (when asset prices are at their lowest), forcing them to sell at the worst possible time.
What This Means For Us
While mtuual funds are an easy way to invest in the market, I generally advise people to stay away because there are better alternatives such as an index fund. The high fees, coupled with the lack of control is simply too high a barrier for fund managers to overcome.
However, some (your 401k for instance) only have mutual funds as the only option to invest. In these cases, make sure you pick funds where the fees are as low as possible. Otherwise, the fees will eat away at your return which can add up to significant amounts over long periods of time.
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Great article. One thing to mention as a disadvantage, often times there is some overlap when you have different kinds of funds. These overlaps can cause redundancy in your portfolio or even worse, positions to work against eachother. I guess a positive spin on that could be that you’re hedging but it would be a very bad hedging strategy.
The notion of the 10-12 well selected assets is well documented. It leaves one to wonder if it only takes a relative handful to diversify away most risk except systemic why would a mutual fund hold so many assets (assuming it is not an index fund)?
Question: Why is there such a disparity between the net real returns of 8-9% produced by our Mutual Fund Winners Spreadsheet (MFWS) since 1994 compared to the average investor’s net real returns of 1-2% after fees, expenses, taxes and inflation?
Rather than bemoan this sad state of affairs and since it is unrealistic to expect expenses, taxes and inflation to be drastically reduced any time soon, the investigation’s approach was to find out what controllable factor(s) are responsible for this corrosive drag on performance.
Since fees are controllable, the MFWS is confined only to no-load funds. These funds have no fees and, therefore, incur no additional acquisition costs giving the fund investor an initial, but limited, boost in returns. While this was a valuable contribution to justify a healthy subscription fee, the investigation was not satisfied and probed further and deeper into the problem.
After 15 years of research using over 200 million data cells and some luck, we found the culprit. It was adverse selection, which is the systematic selection of more losers than winners usually on a 75:25 ratio basis. By reversing these odds, scientifically, many times more winners than losers are now easily and consistently picked.
A winner is defined as a fund whose performance consistently outperforms the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index over time. A loser is defined as a fund whose performance consistently under performs the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index over time.
This strategy has been carefully honed over the last 15 years to produce stellar results. It uses so much mathematics, science and investment experience it would make your head spin. All the work has been done for you. It consistently outperforms the S&P 500. It is easy to use. It works.
The MFWS was designed in 1994 to enable investors with no previous fund investment experience (or with loads of it) to pick winners, to overcome adverse selection, to become successful investors and take control of their financial lives.
These are the scientifically verified facts as opposed to the collection of unsubstantiated anecdotes permeating print, press and the internet that deny investors financial independence.
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