Displaying items by tag: mutual funds

Friday, 11 December 2020 11:11

Stop Wasting Time Searching for Funds

Did you know that most advisors spend 5.5 hours per week handling investment management related tasks like searching for funds? That stat comes from Kitces.com and does a good job highlighting what has become an increasingly difficult problem for advisors: how to find the right funds when there is an ever-increasing ocean of options, including many that look very similar. Between screeners with limited criteria (I want “value ESG”, not just “value”) and the pain of cross-asset class searches, finding funds has increasingly become a real quagmire for time and effort. Imagine if you could have three extra hours per week to focus on new client acquisition instead of cycling through drop-down menus trying to find funds? Well, a company called Magnifi has a great new tool to help you do just that. For example, international stocks are getting some attention from Wall Street analysts right now because of their favorable valuations versus US stocks. However, finding the right international funds is even harder than doing so for domestic stocks. For example, you might want to find the best ETFs focused on Asia. Because of the antiquated architecture of existing fund screeners, it would take hours of work to pin down funds in the right fee range and with the right composition. Instead, Magnifi uses natural language search to immediately display and compare all the relevant funds for your query. For example, here are the results for searching “China Value Funds”.

FINSUM Nasdaq2 China Value Funds

Another great thing about Magnifi is that they incorporate FI360’s fiduciary risk score for every fund, allowing you to incorporate that element for clients and rest easy with concern to regulations.


FINSUM: In our view, Magnifi is the best way to search and filter investments, period. Once you try it out you will quickly move on from the many ETF “screeners” available.

 

Published in Wealth Management
Thursday, 31 October 2019 12:20

New Tool Gives Mutual Funds ESG Scores

(New York)

ESG has been on the rise. In its infancy, ESG was largely diminished to a niche sector, but increasingly large amounts of investor capital are flowing based on ESG considerations and clients are getting more and more focused on it. Now there is a new tool to score and rank mutual funds based on ESG factors. The tool is from As You Sow. It is still a work in progress, but is quite useful for getting an idea for where funds rank against one another.


FINSUM: This tool is still in development, but we could imagine that this could become quite useful as ESG is famously hard to grade.

Published in Eq: Large Cap
Monday, 28 October 2019 12:07

Get Ready for Roadkill in the ETF Industry

(New York)

The ETF industry has been undermining the mutual fund business for years, but it is now set to undergo a transformation itself. In particular, as many as half of the 2,000+ ETFs currently listed are likely to close in the next few years as they die off from a lack of assets. Most ETFs need to reach somewhere between $50m and $100m to break even, but currently more than half of the 2,100 or so ETFs have less than $100m. The problem is that the market has become so inundated with new concepts—and so top heavy from broad index funds—that attracting assets is very difficult. Accordingly, many ETFs, including from large providers, are likely to close over the next couple years.


FINSUM: Big names have already started shuttering funds that were underperforming in terms of assets. Expect more of the same.

Published in Wealth Management
Wednesday, 16 October 2019 08:32

Mutual Funds Aren’t Included in Zero Fee Shift

(New York)

Investors and advisors—don’t get too excited about the zero fee shift among the big brokers, it is not all that it appeared to be. In particular, mutual funds seem to have been entirely left behind in the zero fee shift. Essentially, none of the big brokers has scrapped fees on mutual fund trades. While ETFs are now free to trade, mutual funds in some cases have transaction fees as high as $75.


FINSUM: This is going to wound the mutual fund market further, as not only do mutual funds have higher fees, but trading them will now be commensurately more difficult than ETFs too.

Published in Wealth Management
Tuesday, 10 September 2019 12:35

The Best Mutual Funds Might Not Be from Vanguard

(New York)

Vanguard is a pretty tough firm to beat in the mutual fund space. Their sterling reputation is hard to top, and no one seems to outdo them in the asset class. However, there may be a viable competitor: boutique manager Dodge & Cox. In fact, the fund manager just got ranked first out of 150 mutual fund companies by Morningstar. The rankings are based “on a variety of factors, including analyst fund ratings, expense ratios, and corporate stewardship”. Perhaps most importantly for investors, almost all Dodge & Cox mutual funds beat their category averages over the last decade.


FINSUM: Dodge & Cox has outperformed Vanguard in many ways, though obviously Vanguard can offer lower costs than anyone else. In many cases, though, performance has been good enough to more than account for the difference in fees.

Published in Wealth Management
Page 8 of 13

Contact Us

Newsletter

Subscribe

Subscribe to our daily newsletter

Top
We use cookies to improve our website. By continuing to use this website, you are giving consent to cookies being used. More details…