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Investment Funds
Investment funds are considered to be the smartest choice for beginner and small investors. Investment funds are known by many names: collective investment schemes, mutual funds, and managed funds. It is designed for individual investors, and it means the sticking together of many different people and participating in a great variety of investments. Each investment fund requires a staff, which is construced of a manager (the one who manages the financial issues), a board, which has as its primary aim the making of decisions while never letting out of sight the current laws and regulations, shareholders, who own the assets, and a company which does business with the shareholders’ money (buys and sells things to earn more money).
One of the most important advantages of investment funds are the low risk factors. Each mutual fund operates on the so called spreading risk principle. This means that your money is spread across many investments, so if one equity collapses, the others may still do well, thus the damage is considerably reduced. The more diversified the class of assets is, the lower the capital risk possibilities are. Another advantage is that you promote your money together with other people’s money, thus you are buying in bulk in fact, which means that dealing costs are insignificant.

Among the disadvantages one can take into consideration the costs for the working staff. The manager, the administrator will have to receive remuneration. This cost is always taken directly from the fund assets. Professional financial advice is also expensive, and this is often built into the investment scheme. It is also a disadvantage that you don’t have free will to choose the type of investment you want to put money in. The portfolio of securities is always selected by the fund’s manager. This me ans that you don’t have to make any intellectual contribution; all you are required to do is to provide the money. Therefore, investing money in mutual funds is a good option only for those people who refuse to analyze or are unable to understand how investments work. Let’s face it: it is more comfortable to let experts decide instead of us, especially when it comes about the seemingly boring and complicated financial stuffs. However, fund managers are not some kind of magicians, the favorable profits may not be due to their excellent decisions: everything depends on a considerable amount of luck as well, as mutual funds shares fluctuate according to the general fortune of the market.
Investment funds management can choose two options in order to get real profit (that is a return higher than inflation):

  • Active management: means a continuous promotion and circulation of the money, drawing up a dynamic portfolio of buying and selling. This is a strategy which always keeps an eye on the market changes and developments, deeply analyzing many investments at the same time, in order to outperform the market. And you should not forget that active management operates on quite expensive taxes.

  • Passive management: is also called an index fund, which does not allow future variations, it simply mimics the market’s current situation. It is based on the belief, that market changes are unpredictable, thus one never knows which share will perform better in a given period of time. Therefore a wide range of securities are often selected by random. Passive management also operates with the buy and hold method, in which the portfolio is fixed from outset. Of course, this type of fund management has the lowest fees.
If you decide to invest in mutual funds, here are some smart tips:
  • Since there are a lot of companies you must be very careful regarding which one to choose. Information can generally be found on the website of each investment fund, in downloadable brochures. The first step is to check out the fund’s management: they must be professionals with experience. See if there were changes in the managerial staff, and how this affects the company’s overall performance.

  • Compare the different mutual funds. You can truly measure a fund’s performance if you compare it to other similar funds in that particular field. Use the websites and online calculators which do the comparison for you.

  • Get a picture: that is look at the company’s history, and see if it produced a steady growth or swings from time to time. There are some fields which are more volatile than others: for example technology and finance sectors are more likely to fluctuate than health care.

  • Time planning: do no let yourself tempted by new, market beating funds. It could be a short term outburst that will eventually cool off. The longer a fund is in business, the steadier and more trustworthy it becomes.

  • Fees and expenses. Before investing into a mutual fund, see what are the shareholder fees and yearly operating expenses. Fee tables are worthy to check out, since these describe the financial obligations in detail, always providing calculation examples of hypothetical amounts over different time periods.
As a beginner investor you have to obtain information through many ways: call or write to the mutual fund, and ask for more details, contact the manager that sells the fund’s shares, search online databases for the fund’s earlier profit figures, and finally download and go through the company’s prospects.
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