Mutual Funds

MUTUAL FUNDS

In funding your retirement account options, you may wish to consider mutual funds and ETF’s. The investment professionals at Anchor Bay can recommend a diversified portfolio that can assist you in reaching your investment objectives.

A mutual fund and ETF share represents a part of a portfolio of financial securities – stocks, bonds, cash equivalents, or a mix of these securities. Investors pool their money through these ownership shares and invest together stocks and bonds or cash equivalents takes more time, money and expertise than many people have. For those reasons, many investors prefer mutual funds for the convenience and professional investment management they offer.

With mutual funds, you can easily allocate your investment dollars among the three asset classes – stocks, bonds, and cash/cash equivalents. You tailor your portfolio base on your investment time horizon and leave the research, record keeping, and buying and selling of securities to financial professional. Besides this professional expertise, you have diversification – the money you invest is spread among the securities the mutual fund owns. This helps cushion the stock if one of the securities drops in price.

You should select a mutual fund carefully. Mutual funds invest to meet an objective. These objective include long-term growth, high current income, growth and income, or stability of principal. Performance can vary widely among funds that invest in similar assets and similar goals. This occurs because of different selection criteria, management philosophy, and operating expenses between funds. Before buying a mutual fund, read information about these issues in the fund’s prospectus.

Mutual fund shares are offered as “load” and “no-load”. A load is the commission paid to investment professional to compensate them for their advice. Since no-load funds are sold directly to the investor without an investment professional, there is no need for a sales charge. No-load funds do charge management fees and expense fees, but these fees are not necessarily increased to make up for the lack of a sales charge. The way to compare total expenses between mutual funds – whether load or no-load – is to look at the “Expense Summary” in the first five pages of any fund’s prospectus.

Investing in mutual funds involves investment risk, including the possible loss of principal.

You can have access to thousands of mutual funds through Anchor Bay Securities.