Why are there so many mutual funds? The answer is because mutual fund providers are making lots of money selling them. The number of mutual funds has little to do with serving investors’ best interests.
The Large Cap Value style ranks second out of the twelve fund styles as detailed in my Style Rankings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. It gets my Neutral rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 42 ETFs and 772 mutual funds in the Large Cap Value style as of July 11, 2013.
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.