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Jewish World Review Feb. 25, 2008 19 Adar I 5768 Before abandoning your mutual fund By Gail Marks Jarvis
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) Do you have a mutual fund that's a loser? One you hate? One that has been draining your 401(k) of your hard-earned savings since October? Say, for example, you have a mutual fund that invests in large companies - a fund that might have "large cap" in its name and invests in stocks like Google, Wal-Mart Stores and Exxon Mobil. If so, it would not be surprising if you have lost 13 percent of the money you had in the fund in early October. A Northwestern University graduate student thought a drop of 13 percent was reason to sell his fund. "I've lost $3,000 in my mutual fund," he complained to me recently, as he sought an idea for a "better fund." But as I told him, and other people who have written to me about evaporating money lately, a loss in a mutual fund is not necessarily a reason to sell. And a loss alone is no indication that your mutual fund is a loser, or that your fund manager has lost the ability to pick stocks skillfully. Novice investors often make this mistake about mutual funds. They see a loss and think they have bought the wrong fund. They figure a brainier manager at some other fund would steer them away from bad stocks and make their money grow. What they don't realize is that at times like this, with investors nervous and selling a range of stocks, every mutual fund that invests in stocks is likely to lose money, at least temporarily. The average large-cap fund is the type of fund that should be a mainstay in a 401(k), individual retirement account or other long-term investment portfolio in good times and bad for the stock market. If you have one of these funds, and it's acting like the average fund that invests in large companies, it has lost 13.7 percent between Oct. 9, when the market peaked, and Feb. 14, according to Lipper Inc., a firm that tracks mutual funds. Is a 13.7 percent drop in your fund awful? Obviously, for your peace of mind, it is. But the way an investment professional would look at it is that a 13.7 percent drop isn't bad. It's actually average - which, in investing, is considered just fine. To determine whether a fund manager is performing adequately, the manager's boss would compare the fund's loss to the stock market in general. For large stocks that means using the Standard & Poor's 500 index as a measure for the stock market. That index was down 13.6 percent in that period. And since that index reflects what's been happening to stocks of large companies, a fund that invests in large companies and loses just 13 percent over the same time period would be considered OK. In fact, it's a little above average. In other words, the fund feels like a loser but is actually a winner - at least comparatively speaking. Of course, if a financial adviser was sizing up a mutual fund, the adviser wouldn't base a conclusion on just five months. The fund manager might have been lucky during a five-month period, holding stocks that didn't happen to be hit as much as others. Perhaps the manager happened to be holding a lot of cash from a surge in investors who just started using the fund. When a fund is holding a lot of cash and the stock market turns down, the cash helps insulate the fund somewhat from losses on the stocks. To find a winner, financial advisers look at much longer periods. They want to find funds that have done at least as well as the market and competing mutual funds for five years or more. Ten years is better, but it's difficult to find funds with managers who have that track record. Like any other profession, people who are at the top move to new jobs. So if you have a fund that's been a winner, the manager may leave and a new one will take over. In that case, do not give the new manager credit for the past. The new boss might be handling your money very differently. If you are troubled by a mutual fund during the downturn in the market, you can see how it measures up to other funds by going to www.morningstar.com. On the home page, type in the name of your fund and get what's called the ticker, the five letters that identify the fund. After you click, scroll down to "total returns" in the gray box on the left. Click on that. Under "trailing total returns," notice the far right column "% rank in category" and look at how your fund stands. For example, look up Dodge & Cox Stock fund, with the ticker DODGX. It has been one of the finest funds for 10 years. It is in the upper 2 percent of all funds like it. The last 12 months haven't been as good. With investments in financial companies, which have been detested lately, it has fallen to the 67th percentile - below the average, which would be 50. But with a fund this strong over a long period of time, a financial adviser would not abandon it based on one year. Fund managers aren't at the top every year. Funds that slip for more than a year, however, should be analyzed. It's possible they are charging high fees, which tend to undermine funds even worse than bad stock picking. Meanwhile, if you check out all your funds, make sure you make the right comparisons. Large caps should only be compared to other large caps. So if you have a fund that invests in small companies, compare it only to other small-cap funds and the Russell 2000 index. A small-cap fund would be above the average if it lost no more than 16.8 percent since Oct. 9, according to Lipper. And if you have an international fund and compare it to the average fund that invests throughout the world, yours will be better than average if it has lost no more than 12.5 percent. To find a mutual fund that feels like a winner in the current environment, look to bond funds. The average U.S. Treasury bond fund, which invests in safe Treasuries, has climbed 6.6 percent since Oct. 9, according to Lipper. That's why you are supposed to hold some bond funds along with your stock funds. The bonds buffer the pain from stock declines. But in the long run, your stocks will do better. So the winning combination of mutual funds would involve stock and bond funds. If you had had about 20 percent of your money invested in bonds, and the rest in a blend of stock funds, you might have lost about 9 percent since October. That's probably an uncomfortable loss, but over the last 82 years, stocks have averaged a 10.4 percent annual increase while bonds have averaged just 5.5 percent. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Gail Marks Jarvis is a personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune and author of "Saving for Retirement without Living Like a Pauper or Winning the Lottery." Comment by clicking here.
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