No Load Mutual Funds Investment Hype vs Investment Help

•How to Find Value in No Load Mutual Fund Investing
 by: Ulli G. Niemann What are you thinking when it comes to your no load mutual fund selections? Are you saving pennies and sacrificing dollars? Are you spending your time looking at expense ratios, analyzing Morningstar ratings and searching for funds with low fees and no 12b1 charges? If you are like most people, you know these things in and out. You've spent hours evaluating them, and your chosen mutual funds cost little to purchase and maintain. But they still don't perform to your...

•How to Evaluate Load vs No Load Mutual Funds
 by: Ulli G. Niemann If you have been dealing with mutual funds for any length of time, you undoubtedly have faced the question of which is better: Load Funds or No Load Funds. If you are new to investing, load simply refers to the commission paid to the broker selling the fund. No load means there is no commission on the purchase or sale. Most discussions in the past have centered exclusively on performance comparisons. Even rating services like Morningstar have occasionally chimed in...

•Prospering with Mutual Funds How anyone can Afford an Investment Advisor
 by: Ulli G. Niemann Recently I was invited to appear on a live CNNfn television show to discuss my article “How to evaluate Load vs. No Load Mutual Funds.” (You can read that article on my website http://www.successful-investment.com/articles21.htm) As the producer and I were working out the logistics of my appearance, she mentioned in passing that “most people can’t afford an investment advisor.” While that wasn’t the time or place for me to discuss this, I realized that many people...

•No Load Mutual Funds or Exchange Traded Funds ETFs
(ETFs)?  by: Ulli G. Niemann If you are fed up with early redemption charges and ever increasing mutual fund management fees on top of bad-performing fund managers, read on. There is a quiet revolution going on in the no-load mutual fund industry and you, the individual investor, may benefit from it greatly. I am referring to Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which have been around for years, but have grown tremendously since their inception. There are currently over 100 choices with around $10...

•Do Lifestyle Funds Provide Greater Security
?  by: Ulli G. Niemann With the stock market stubbornly refusing to settle down and smooth out, Wall Street has been scrambling to come up with product they can sell to gun shy investors. One such new concept is the Lifestyle fund; an extremely diversified package designed to be the single fund in an investor's portfolio. There are two general types of these funds, in which assets are spread out across a wide range of stocks and bonds. In one, securities are held directly, in the other,...

•The Inside Scoop on Mutual Fund Rip Offs
 by: Ulli G. Niemann The bear market that showed up at the end of 2000 has every brokerage house-as well as the entire mutual fund industry-scrambling to find creative ways to boost both their image and bottom line. Unfortunately, this is often at the investors' expense. Fund managers are ever on the lookout for ways to spin the stats to hide lousy track records and to find ways to obscure fees. To add insult to (financial) injury, investors end up being penalized for selling. So what's...

•Your Worst Enemy To Successful Investing The Media
 by: Ulli G. Niemann How do you make your investment decisions and where do you get your information? If you're like most of the people I know, you look to the experts. That's fine, however it's important to be aware that for every expert, there's an opinion and for every opinion there's an expert. I have a friend who says that opinions are like noses: everyone has one but you wouldn't live in anyone else's nose! Around the first of the year, along with the New Year's resolutions,...

•Lies Damn Lies and Mutual Fund Returns
 by: Ulli G. Niemann How many times has this happened to you? You're at a social function and the conversation turns to investing. Pretty soon, people are comparing how well their investments are doing. As you might imagine, being an investment advisor this happens to me a lot. However, I recently had an experience with it that startled me. Bob, one of the guys I was chatting with at a party, asked what kind of returns I had made for my clients with my methodical no load mutual fund...

•How to Maximize Your 401k Mutual Fund Returns
 by: Ulli G. Niemann When it comes to 401k's there is an overabundance of sad stories. Here is one that at least has a happy ending—and it's getting happier all the time. Last year (in 2002) a friend of mine—let’s call him Jack—phoned and asked if I could help him with his 401k. Jack works for a large company as Senior VP of lending and is financially pretty astute. However, when it came to his 401k mutual fund decisions, he had repeatedly made the same mistake most people were making. As...

•How To Beat The Mutual Fund Companies At Their Own Game
 by: Ulli G. Niemann You'd have had to be living on a desert island with no TV, newspaper or internet connection to have missed hearing about the great mutual fund scandal of 2003. The issue was that some mutual fund companies allowed certain hedge funds to engage in after-hours trading, sometimes incorrectly referred to as market timing. Unfortunately, some companies have used the confusion about the term market timing to further their own cause. How? They have used this issue to pretty...