Tag Archives: individual retirement accounts

Mutual Fund Investing for Every Investment Purpose

  By petillo | December 27, 2010 - 2:26 pm | 401k, financial planning, index funds, IRA, Mutual Fund Investing, personal finance, Profitable Investments, Repercussions: A Retirement Review, Retirement Planning Target 2025, taxes
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You have mutual funds if you have a 401(k). Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs)hold mutual funds as the primary investment and despite their use throughout the world of investment and retirement planning, too few people have a positive attitude about what this tool can do for them. Most of the negative propaganda comes in spite of the ease of use, often lower expenses than any other investment tool, accessibility, better transparency (or well on the way to providing better insight) and often, tax efficiency. Some do this with great effort; others revamp their portfolio only when an index is restructured.

So what are mutual funds and how can they improve your life in 2011? There are only two types: actively managed or those indexed to a specific grouping of investments. From there, it gets complicated but getting from there is where the whole traffic jam of ideas begins. It makes no matter, which school of thought you ascribe to if you do at all: everyone needs and actively managed group of mutual funds and a passive group if you expect to do anything worthwhile in 2011.

In the coming year, one which is predicted to be quite good despite my doubts, which I will put forth in couple of days with my year-end look at 2011, diversity will deliver more than simply chasing one ideology of the other. The “indexers believe that these sorts of funds are all you need to succeed in any year. Offset by relatively low costs, these funds make up for hoping that that through diversity they can achieve better than average returns for those who invest in them.

As a group, index investors are a fervent bunch. They espouse this investment as the be-all-to-end-all tool and in doing so, give those who chose the other camp – the actively invested mutual fund – to wonder if they may be right. There are reams of research that indexers point to as the reason why they believe this approach. But passively sitting back and letting the market determine your investment outcome is not for everyone.

Actively managed mutual funds are structured in the same way as index funds: a portfolio of investments (stocks, bonds or both), a manager (be it one, more than one or a computer), disclosure and regulatory rules that they must abide by, and performing as billed, if not better. The difference in who picks what is in the fund. Index funds are determined by an index published by such notables as Standard and Poors or Russell or Wilshire. Actively managed funds contain investments picked by management.

Both bring like-minded investors together to pool their money and in doing so, offset the risk and cost of having to build a similar portfolio on your own. Actively managed funds try and outperform their index counterparts in large part because it is these indexes, right or wrong, in which their performance is gauged and graded. If they do better than an index, investors notice, add their money and create increased opportunities for the fund manager to increase those returns with additional acquisitions.

It doesn’t always work and some comparisons are unjust (how can you compare a fund with fewer than 100 holdings to one where 500 are held?) and do not paint a true picture of performance. But in tandem, they might work for different reasons for everyone interested in a more profitable 2011.

In times of turmoil, everyone feels pain. When the whole of the marketplace dropped precipitously in 2008, no investor escaped. Some were damaged more than others but as a group, we all felt pain in some form almost at the same time. Investors who simply plowed money into a 401(k) or loaded up on their own company’s stock and thought that investing was a world of do-no-wrong, were given a rude awakening. Those that traded actively on their own and were beginning to feel some invincibility creep into their results were caught unaware as well.

And in the past year, investors in US stock funds did what they had done in the previous three, withdrew more than they invested, Called outflows, they impact mutual funds harder than the selling of shares from your own portfolio. These outflowing funds are produced with the sales of a portion of the portfolio. And every such move impacts the remaining shareholders in the mutual fund.

Inflows, or your money pouring into a mutual fund comes automatically in a 401(k), through deductions into an IRA and self-deposited by individual investors. Yet only a handful of people I speak with everyday likes the idea of a mutual fund as an investment and if last year was any indication, think fund focused on the US stock market alone is not the path to financial success.

Why? We want simple things to work extraordinarily well. Nothing does but we expect it of mutual funds. We want low fees, we want moderate risk and we want to know that our money is safe from market interruptions and taxes. And at the same time, we want growth, to retire early and to have our investments perform without hiccup for decades. Only mutual funds can do this – even if we dislike the idea.

Low fees, moderate risk, safety and tax efficiency is a tall order with three of the four fitting the index fund bill. Safety is subjective and safer, even more so. But no equity index fund alone can do this. No bond index fund alone can do it either. Target date funds, hybrids of other equity and bond funds (and often a basket of such funds from the fund family) promise all of the above but have yet to prove they can deliver.

Yet three out of four isn’t bad. Put this type of fund in a Roth IRA and put as much as you can in it, consistently over 2011 and you will do as well as this year has done (which looks to be two back-to-back years of double digit gains for the S&P500 index). Even if you do half as well as the 20% plus gain in 2009, you’ll be way ahead of where you’d be otherwise.

In the other group, looking for growth, outsized returns and freedom from hiccups, look to your 401(k) where your employer may be retuning to offering a match in 2011. If they do, this is not so much free money as hedged money. A 6% match added to your 6% contribution gives you a lot more room to assume risk that you probably are. Retiring early is a dream even as we acquiesce to work longer. But it can be closer to a reality if two things happen: you invest more and use actively managed funds in your 401(k) to get there and the market corrects a little in the first half of the year. This means buying more for less and positioning yourself for a good 2011. Not 2010, but close.

Whatever your outlook for 2011, a tandem approach to investing – using index funds and actively managed mutual funds might be the best approach in the next year. Be cautious of only two things: this isn’t advise and be careful you don’t over-expose yourself in any one sector.

Mutual Funds Comparisons: The Manager

  By petillo | December 18, 2009 - 3:48 pm | 401k, IRA, Mutual Fund Investing, Retirement Planning Target 2025
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We have been looking at the tool we most often use for retirement, be it in your 401k or in an Individual Retirement Account (IRA): the mutual fund.  We have explored fees and performance earlier this month and found that there are more elements for confusion than there are clarity.  Now we delve into the most difficult comparison of all: the mutual fund manager.

The mutual fund manager may any one of the following: a man, a woman, a team, or a computer.  They may use an algorithm, a method or simply rely on their vast years of experience. Whatever they may be, they are held responsible for the invested dollars you have channeled into their charge.  They have a fiduciary responsibility, as all members of the securities industry do, to do what is best for the least investor.

But many are also beholden to a higher power, the shareholder who owns the company that owns the mutual fund.  It is often this conflict that gets in the way of the fund manager from doing what is best for their investors.  According to Dan Jamieson writing for Investment News, a magazine focused on the adviser industry the problem is not fees or performance, although they play a role.  It is whether or not the fund manager agrees with what they are doing to invest in their own fund.

According to Jamieson “Morningstar also found that in 51% of the 4,383 funds it has tracked for manager ownership levels over the past five years, fund managers owned no stake at all. Having a stake in a mutual fund means that managers have their interests “truly aligned with shareholders’,” said Karen Dolan, director of fund analysis at Morningstar.”

On the surface this appears to be troubling.  According to the report, only 413 of the fund managers in this cross section of funds, many of which contain index funds, target date funds, funds with offshore management, funds that invest in tax-free municipal bonds that are invested in another state and fixed income funds and, it should be noted encompass only about half of the available funds, have $1 million or more of their own dollars invested alongside their shareholders.

Once again, this tells only part of the story.  The rest is left to speculation. So we will speculate.  Suppose you were working for a firm whose products were used by consumers.  But the actual product is more of a store front, a collection of other products made by other manufacturers.  Suppose we use the example of a grocer, which like a mutual fund manager collects a fees for representing their owners and the the products s/he sells to the customers who shop there.

Like the fund manager, the grocer is merely a conduit, a middle man. The fund manager/grocer is actually employed by someone other than the products s/he sells and in all likelihood, they have their own retirement plans.  If they were smart investors in those plans, they would be diversified.  But I would be willing to wager that every fund manager holds an unadvisedly large amount of their own company’s stock.  This is more than company’s fault than the fund managers and like the grocer, they go where the match is.

So why would they invest in their own products in addition to what they put away in their 401k plans?  Because they consider themselves investors.  Most mutual fund investors do not consider themselves savvy enough to carry forth into the world of investing on their own.  They choose funds because owning individual stocks is not as easy as it sounds. But fund managers may seem as though they are above the fray, able to pick amongst the best stocks without diversifying the way fund manager’s expect.

Should fund managers invest in their own funds?  Some believe they should and because they don’t want their fund managers to show up on the Morningstar list as having no invested interest, they have begun paying bonuses in fund shares.  Does side-by-side alignment help fund performance? It is possible that they fund might do better but the jury is still out on that one.

While Jamieson adds, “Some managers may invest in their strategies, she [Dolan] noted, but through a separate-account platform at lower cost than the public fund” he believes that this sort of investing should be a shared experience.

Almost as a caveat, “Furthermore, some funds may not be available outside of retirement plans, Ms. Dolan said. At the same time, some managers don’t want to be pigeonholed into a particular style. Others might hesitate to invest because they know they may not be around very long, or they invest through a separately managed account platform at a lower cost than the public fund.”

So how do we compare how they do? While people who subscribe to the belief the index funds beat actively managed funds more times than not, as we said previously, not all actively managed funds hold the same number of stocks as the index.  The question should really be: how efficient are they?

Fund managers need to have a frim grasp on the cost of running the fund.  They should keep taxable events to aminimum, turnover costs as low as possible and have the ability to reign in outsized research costs.  They should encourage theior employers (not you the shareholder as many would have you believe) to lower expenses as much as is physically possible in the hope that this will attract more investors who pay less, not a few who pay more.

And lastly, to act unlike a human. We do not what mutual fund managers falling back on the same foibles that the rest of us possess.  They should be cold-hearted and analytical, hard-nosed and calculated. They should be able to forecast and predict with amazing accuracy. They should be everything we are not.

In they end, they are just like us.  They want to keep their jobs and please the investor who has put their money in their charge. You are the customer.  You can always walk.

Paul Petillo is the Managing Editor of Target2025.com