Finding the best mutual funds is an increasingly difficult task in a world with so many mutual funds. Investors cannot trust mutual fund labels or names. They do not tell you enough about what you are getting when you buy a mutual fund.
This report identifies the “best” ETFs and mutual funds based on the quality of their holdings and their costs. As detailed in “Low-Cost Funds Dupe Investors”, there are few funds that have both good holdings and low costs. While there are lots of cheap funds, there are very few with high-quality holdings.
The Information Technology sector ranks second out of the ten sectors as detailed in my sector rankings for ETFs and mutual funds. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 27 ETFs and 146 mutual funds in the Information Technology sector as of October 9, 2012.
The all-cap growth style ranks fourth out of the twelve fund styles as detailed in my style roadmap. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 2 ETFs and 457 mutual funds in the all-cap growth style as of April 24, 2012.
The large cap growth investment style ranks third out of the twelve investment styles as detailed in my style roadmap. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of fund ratings of all 771 funds in the style.
For those investors interested in rigorous research, I offer my roadmap to the best stocks and funds in the market by sector. The full sector roadmap is here.
Having too many choices can be intimidating. And there are definitely lots of choices when it comes to ETFs. For example, in the equity market alone, there 30+ technology sector ETFs, or 35 ‘large cap value’ and 20 financial ETFs. A very healthy selection abounds for every category of ETF.
The problem is that these ETFs are not made the same even though they may be in the same category. There are major differences in methodologies between funds, which results in drastically different holdings even within a given sector. See Figure 1.
Over the past 10 years, ARBA appears as quite a success story and one of the few ‘internet bubble’ companies to survive and reach profitability, on a GAAP accounting basis at least. Looking beyond the reported accounting results, however, reveals that ARBA is not quite as profitable a company as it seems, and its valuation has out-grown its profits by a wide margin – the required combination of factors for making February’s list of most dangerous stocks.