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Investors Are Finding Opportunities Beyond Their U.S. Borders

Experts say global and international mutual funds can represent a world of opportunity for investors.

Foreign-based companies now comprise fully half of the world’s equity market capitalization, up from about one-third in 1970, and many key industries such as oil and gas, wireless telecommunications and building construction are dominated by foreign companies.

However, despite the investment opportunities presented by these companies, research shows that international stocks remain significantly underrepresented in most U.S. portfolios. It’s estimated that on average Americans hold only about 5 percent of their portfolios in foreign stocks and funds.

Even if they do not realize it, the lives of Americans are influenced by global companies. Perhaps it was the medication taken before bedtime, the car driven to work or the soft drink that accompanied lunch. All are likely to have been products of companies that operate beyond the U.S.

According to ING Funds, the U.S. retail mutual fund unit of ING Group, one of the largest financial service organizations in the world, international equity markets offer investors exposure to many key industries that countries other than the U.S. dominate.

The mutual fund unit has recently embarked on a “Going Global” campaign to introduce more people to international investing.

“ING is working hard to help more people understand how the world of investing is changing,” said Bob Boulware, president and CEO of ING Funds. According to Boulware, “Those that are not thinking globally may be missing out.”

Just as the domestic portion of an investor’s portfolio is typically allocated to include a range of investment options, investors may wish to apply that same logic to their international portfolio, selecting an array of sub-asset classes to better position themselves for changing international market conditions. One way to get started would be for investors to consider global and international mutual funds.

Global funds can provide exposure to opportunities around the world-both international and domestic. International mutual funds may be better suited for individuals seeking purely foreign holdings to complement their existing domestic portfolio.
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How to select a mutual fund

One of the most common ways of selecting a mutual fund is to invest with the crowd in today’s hot funds. Unfortunately, jumping from one winning fund to another is a recipe for disaster. The mutual funds that the crowd follows typically have had a hot recent performance and tend to gather all the new mutual fund sales.

Investors as a whole are primarily allocating their new investments to a small number of mutual funds and to a smaller number of mutual fund companies. Investors have invested over $400 billion in the 2843 different mutual funds, but one-third of those assets are invested in only 50 of those funds and one-half of those assets are invested in the largest 100 funds.

There are benefits to following the market leaders. Larger mutual fund companies and larger funds have the ability to reduce costs and attract the best professional money managers. However, the biggest limitation is that today’s better-selling mutual fund may not be tomorrow’s winner. This is true for any mutual fund but it seems to plague the best seller, and the one that garners the most attention, the most often. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Pick A Profitable Mutual Fund

We have all heard the advantages of investing in a mutual fund over trying to pick individual stocks. First of all mutual funds hire professional analysts that are market experts and devout many hours of study to the various stocks. Unless you want to devout a large portion of your free time to the study of the financial reports, you probably won’t have as much information to make a decision as a mutual fund manager.

Then there is the well documented advantage of diversification. Risk is reduced by holding several non correlated investments. Put simply, some go up, some go down and combined, the return levels off the fluctuations, or risk.

Finally, a mutual fund offers smaller investors a chance to invest in small increments rather than having to save a large chunk of cash to purchase 100 shares of stock.

Given the above advantages, it’s no wonder that mutual funds have become a very popular form of investing. Now there are thousands of mutual funds to choose from, so how does one make a selection? Here are a few tips:

1. Do not be seduced to jump on the recently performing best fund. It may seem like the safe and rational thing to do, but like individual stocks, you want to buy low and sell high, not buy high and pray for more growth.

2. Even good funds may not be able to overcome the force of the overall market. You should be looking for funds that can exceed the broad market without increasing risk. Each fund has certain risk parameters that it is required to follow. Read the prospectus closely to understand what these are.
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How to look for the Best No Load Mutual Funds

Copyright 2006 Michael Saville

Low fees and expense ratios.

In their search for the best no load mutual fund, some investors tend to select mutual funds based solely on their fees and expense ratios. The rationale is that by choosing mutual funds with low fees, investors can have more of their capital invested. Also, no load mutual funds with low expense ratios will pass on more of the returns they earn to their shareholders. However, metrics such as price/earnings ratio and dividend yield on the S&P 500 index, a commonly used proxy for the U.S. stock market, are hardly at bargain levels. Several market experts forecast single digit annual returns for domestic mutual funds over the next decade.

Is shopping for the lowest fees and expense ratios the right way to select mutual funds? Not always. The answer depends on the type of mutual fund you are evaluating, the time you can devote to evaluating and managing your mutual funds investments, and the type of cost incurred.

Investing in the Best No Load Index Mutual Funds.

If you believe markets are generally efficient and prefer to invest in an index mutual fund to achieve an index-like return, shopping for the best index mutual fund based on low fees and a low expense ratio makes perfect sense. An index mutual fund’s portfolio manager seeks to invest the fund’s assets to track an index as closely and as cost-effectively as possible. Larger index funds have an advantage since they can spread their operating costs over a larger asset base. Some of the interesting index mutual fund options currently available include no load index mutual funds like E*Trade S&P 500 Index Fund (Nasdaq: ETSPX), Fidelity Spartan 500 Index Fund (Nasdaq: FSMKX), and Vanguard 500 Index Fund (Nasdaq: VFINX) with expense ratios of 0.09%, 0.10%, and 0.18%, respectively.
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