Mutual Funds

Overview

There are dozens of magazines cluttering the shelves of your local book megastore with covers proclaiming "The Best Mutual Funds You'll Ever Find for This Year!", "Mutual Funds That Really Work in Crazy Markets Like This One!" and other equally over-capitalized headlines. Don't pay any attention to them. Almost everything that you'll ever need to know about mutual funds is contained in these four simple words: "Buy an index fund." If that seems too simple and not sufficiently attention grabbing, try it this way: "BUY AN INDEX FUND!"

Introduction to Mutual Funds

A mutual fund is simply a collection of stocks and/or bonds. Most mutual funds are "actively managed," meaning the mutual fund shareholders, through a yearly fee, pay a mutual fund manager to actively buy and sell stocks or bonds within the fund. Though you would think that mutual funds provide benefits to shareholders by hiring alleged "expert" stock pickers, the sad truth of the matter is that the vast majority of mutual funds underperform the average return of the stock market. Over time, because of their costs, approximately 80% of mutual funds will underperform the stock market's returns. Currently, most mutual funds do not make their fees very easy for shareholders to understand. (Founding Fool David Gardner testified in September 1998 before Congress on this very topic.

On the whole, the average mutual fund returns approximately 2% less per year to its shareholders than does the stock market in general. The stock market's historical returns are roughly 11% per year, but managed mutual fund shareholders as a group can expect to see any return reduced by the approximate costs imposed by the funds.