In this article, I am going to introduce mutual funds and why they are perceived by many people to be much better than stocks.
Ask yourself, are mutual funds too risky. Although every fund, from money market funds, income funds all the way to equity funds and specialty funds will involve some element of risk, the fact remains that virtually every fund actually reduces risk. How? Through diversification. What this means is that a mutual fund takes all of your money (and every one else’s) and invests in enough securities that anyone with less than $500,000 could never even imagine achieving. And since diversification is key to eliminating risk, saying that mutual funds are too risky is like saying air travel is dangerous. Risk is relative and in terms of reducing that risk, mutual funds achieve it better than any other investment.
Funds are expensive but most are not. Depending on the amount of money invested, most people cannot find better value for every dollar invested than they can when they invest in mutual funds. While the fund companies generate an expense for their administrative efforts, they almost always come in cheaper than investing individually through a discount broker. With most fees at 1% or less, an investor with just $10,000 to invest could only make 10 trades in 1 year at $10 each to achieve the same cost savings. This tells us that funds are owned by so many different unit holders that the collective pays a reduced fee, not the individual investor.
Make sure the management team hasn’t changed by the way. You don’t want to pay for fabulous past results only to find out there is a new portfolio manager in town running your mutual fund. Watch out for the fad funds by the way. By the time an entire mutual fund sector is hot, and ripping up the charts with performance, it is too late 90% of the time, for you to be an investor. You don’t want start becoming an investor in gold as it passes $1200 per ounce. That is the time you want to be thinking about exit.
Mutual funds are basically a highly diversified, risk-spread investments that, while they charge expenses, are cheaper than virtually any other type of investment out there. Best of all, mutual funds can be virtually any asset class, not just equities, providing investors with plenty of options. This is because about 99% of the time, if you own mutual funds your money will be invested in one of the biggest and most established investment types.
Commodities operate in a little different fashion than stocks. Buying a commodity means you actually own something, or in the future you will own something, whether it be so many bushels of corn, pounds of gold, or barrels of oil. You are dealing with real goods, not the performance of a company. Typically, you are buying a contract for a future buy or sell of these goods. And it is a contract you never expect to complete.
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