Mutual funds are professionally managed investment groups that pool together money from individual investors.
This money is used to purchase stocks, bonds and other tradable financial assets that can generate capital gains and income for the fund participants. Each collection of securities is called an investment portfolio.
Guest Blog: Sandy Gallemore, Director and Vice President for Education, InvestEd Inc.
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A mutual fund is a pool of money from many shareholders that is invested in stocks, bonds, or other investment assets. In general, mutual funds may be identified as those that charge a sales fee (load funds) and those that do not charge a sales fee (no-load funds). Many of the load funds offer several classes of shares.
While each share class of a given mutual fund has the same investment policies and objectives and includes money in the same investments, the fees associated with each class likely will cause some difference in the performance results. When a fund offers several share classes, the investor is able to select the class that best suits that investor’s goals and time horizon. The main share classes are identified as Class A shares, Class B shares, and Class C shares. (more…)
Those who deal in mutual funds, much like the clients investing with them, are out to make money. There are a variety of different ways they do this, and one of them is through something called a sales load.
The basic idea behind investing is to grow your assets, of course. However, there are certain factors involved in the entire investment process that can take a chunk out of your expected investment returns. Investment fees are one notorious factor, so we decided that we’d look through some of the basics on expense ratios and their potential impact on investment performance…