Choosing a mutual fund

Choosing a mutual fund. Very few investments of any type have surpassed the long-term growth records of the best-performing common stock funds.

It may help to say more about how you can use these funds.

If you intend to buy load funds through a broker or fund salesperson, you may choose to rely completely on this person s recommendations. Even in this case, it may be useful to know something about sources of information on the funds.

If you have decided in favor of no-load funds and intend to make your own selections, some careful study is obviously a necessity. The more you intend to concentrate on growth and accept the risks that go with it, the more important it is that you entrust your money only to high-quality, tested managements. There are several publications that compile figures on mutual fund performance for periods as long as 10 or even 20 years, with emphasis on common stock funds.

One that is found in many libraries is the Wiesenberger Investment Companies Annual Handbook. The Wiesen-berger Yearbook is the bible of the fund industry, with extensive descriptions of funds, all sorts of other data, and plentiful performance statistics. You may also have access to the Lipper Mutual Fund Performance Analysis, an exhaustive service subscribed to mainly by professionals. It is issued weekly, with special quarterly issues showing longer-term performance. On the newsstands, Money magazine publishes regular surveys of mutual fund performance Barren s weekly has quarterly mutual fund issues in mid- February, May, August and November and Forbes magazine runs an excellent annual mutual fund survey issue in August.

These sources especially Wiesenberger will also give you description of the funds, their investment policies and objectives. When you have selected several funds that look promising, call each fund most have toll-free 800 numbers to get its prospectus and recent financial reports.

The prospectus for a mutual fund plays the same role as that described in New Issues. It is the legal document describing the fund s history and policies and offering the fund s shares for sale. It may be dry reading, but the prospectus and financial reports together should give you a picture of what the fund is trying to do and how well it has succeeded over the latest 10 years. In studying the records of the funds, and in requesting material, don t necessarily restrict yourself to a single risk group.

The best investment managers sometimes operate in ways that aren t easily classified. What counts is the individual fund s record. Obviously, you will want to narrow your choice to one or more funds that have performed well in relation to other funds in the same risk group, or to other funds in general. But don t rush to invest in the fund that happens to have performed best in the previous year concentrate on the record over five or ten years.

A fund that leads the pack for a single year may have taken substantial risks to do so. But a fund that has made its shareholders money grow favorably over a ten-year period, covering both up and down periods in the stock market, can be considered well tested. Its also worth looking at the year-to-year record to see how consistent management has been. You will note that the range of fund performance over most periods is quite wide. Dont be surprised. As we have stressed, managing investments is a difficult art. Fund managers are generally experienced professionals, but their records have nevertheless ranged from remarkably good to mediocre and, in a few cases, quite poor. Pick carefully.