Mutual Funds: What They Are and How to Invest

Mutual funds are baskets of stocks, bonds or other investment assets. By allowing investors to buy into many investments with a single purchase, they can help build more diversified portfolios than most people could build on their own. Index funds, bond funds and target date funds are all types of mutual funds.

Mutual fund investors don’t directly own the stock or other investments held by the fund, but they do share equally in the profits or losses of the fund’s total holdings — hence the “mutual” in mutual funds.

Mutual funds are a relatively hands-off way to invest in many different assets at once — within a single mutual fund, you could gain exposure to hundreds of stocks, bonds or other investments. Mutual funds are popular among investors who don’t want to pick and choose individual investments themselves, but want to benefit from the stock market’s historically high average annual returns.

A mutual fund’s fees and performance will depend on whether it is actively or passively managed.

Passively managed funds invest to align with a specific benchmark. They try to match the performance of a market index (such as the S&P 500), and therefore typically don’t require management by a professional. That translates into lower overhead for the fund, which means passive mutual funds often carry lower fees than actively managed funds.

Here are two types of mutual funds popular for passive investing:

Index funds are made up of stocks or bonds that are listed on a particular index, so the risk aims to mirror the risk of that index, as do the returns. If you own an S&P 500 index fund and you hear that the S&P 500 was up 3% for the day, that means your index fund should be up about that much, too.

Exchange-traded funds can be traded like individual stocks, but offer the diversification benefits of mutual funds. In many cases, ETFs will have a lower minimum investment than index funds. ETFs may be more tax-efficient than index funds.

If you’re ready to invest in mutual funds, here is our step-by-step guide on how to buy them.

Your first choice is perhaps the biggest: Do you want to beat the market or try to mimic it? It’s also a fairly easy choice: One approach costs more than the other, often without delivering better results.

Actively managed funds are managed by professionals who research what’s out there and buy with an eye toward beating the market. While some fund managers might achieve this in the short term, it has proved difficult to outperform the market over the long term and on a regular basis.

Passive investing is a more hands-off approach and is rising in popularity, thanks in large part to the ease of the process and the results it can deliver. Passive investing often entails fewer fees than active investing.

Thinking about your budget in two ways can help determine how to proceed:

How much do mutual funds cost? One appealing thing about mutual funds is that once you meet the minimum investment amount, you can often choose how much money you’d like to invest. Many mutual fund minimums range from $500 to $3,000, though some are in the $100 range and there are a few that have a $0 minimum. So if you choose a fund with a $100 minimum, and you invest that amount, afterward you may be able to opt to contribute as much or as little as you want. If you choose a fund with a $0 minimum, you could invest in a mutual fund for as little as $1.

Aside from the required initial investment, ask yourself how much money you have to comfortably invest and then choose an amount.

Which mutual funds should you invest in? Maybe you’ve decided to invest in mutual funds. But what initial mix of funds is right for you?

Generally speaking, the closer you are to retirement age, the more holdings in conservative investments you may want to have — younger investors typically have more time to ride out riskier assets and the inevitable downturns that happen in the market. One kind of mutual fund takes the guesswork out of the “what’s my mix” question: target-date funds, which automatically reallocate your asset mix as you age.

You need a brokerage account when investing in stocks, but you have a few options with mutual funds. If you contribute to an employer-sponsored retirement account, such as a 401(k), there’s a good chance you’re already invested in mutual funds.

You also can buy directly from the company that created the fund, such as Vanguard or BlackRock, but doing so may limit your choice of funds. You can also work with a traditional financial advisor to purchase funds, but it may incur some additional fees.

Most investors opt to buy mutual funds through an online brokerage, many of which offer a broad selection of funds across a range of fund companies. If you go with a broker, you’ll want to consider:

• Affordability. Mutual fund investors can face two kinds of fees: from their brokerage account (transaction fees) and from the funds themselves (expense ratios and front- and back-end “sales loads”). More on these below.

• Fund choices. Workplace retirement plans may carry only a dozen or so mutual funds. You may want more variety than that. Some brokers offer hundreds, even thousands, of no-transaction-fee funds to choose from, as well as other types of funds like ETFs.

• Research and educational tools. With more choice comes the need for more thinking and research. It’s vital to pick a broker that helps you learn more about a fund before investing your money.

• Ease of use. A brokerage’s website or app won’t be helpful if you can’t make heads or tails of it. You want to understand and feel comfortable with the experience.

Whether you choose active or passive funds, a company will charge an annual fee for fund management and other costs of running the fund, expressed as a percentage of the cash you invest and known as the expense ratio. For example, a fund with a 1% expense ratio will cost you $10 for every $1,000 you invest.

A fund’s expense ratio isn’t always easy to identify upfront (you may have to dig through a fund’s prospectus to find it), but it’s well worth the effort to understand, because these fees can eat into your returns over time.

Mutual funds come in different structures that can impact costs:

• Open-end funds: Most mutual funds are this variety, where there is no limit to the number of investors or shares. The NAV per share rises and falls with the value of the fund.

• Closed-end funds: These funds have a limited number of shares offered during an initial public offering, much as a company would. There are far fewer closed-end funds on the market compared with open-end funds. A closed-end fund’s trading price is quoted throughout the day on a stock exchange. That price may be higher or lower than the fund’s actual value.

Whether or not funds carry commissions is expressed by “loads,” such as:

• Load funds: Mutual funds that pay a sales charge or commission to the broker or salesperson who sold the fund, which is typically passed on to the investor.

• No-load funds: Also known as “no-transaction-fee funds,” these mutual funds charge no sales commissions for the purchase or sale of a fund share. This is the best deal for investors, and online brokers often have thousands of choices for no-transaction-fee mutual funds. Most funds available to individual investors are currently no-load.

Once you determine the mutual funds you want to buy, you’ll want to think about how to manage your investment.

One move would be to rebalance your portfolio once a year, with the goal of keeping it in line with your diversification plan. For example, if one slice of your investments had great gains and now constitutes a bigger share of the pie, you might consider selling off some of the gains and investing in another slice to regain balance.

Sticking to your plan also will keep you from chasing performance. This is a risk for fund investors (and stock pickers) who want to get in on a fund after reading how well it did last year. But “past performance is no guarantee of future performance” is an investing cliche for a reason. It doesn’t mean you should just stay put in a fund for life, but chasing performance almost never works out.

Beyond the active and passive designations, mutual funds are also divided into other categories. Some mutual funds focus on a single asset class, such as stocks or bonds, while others invest in a variety. These are the main types of mutual funds:

Typically carry the greatest risk alongside the greatest potential returns. Fluctuations in the stock market can drastically affect the returns of equity funds. There are several types of equity funds, such as growth funds, income funds and sector funds. Each of these groups tries to maintain a portfolio of stocks with certain characteristics.

Seek to invest in companies that are determined to be undervalued based on the company’s fundamentals.

invest in a mix of stocks, bonds and other securities. Balanced funds (also called asset allocation funds or hybrid funds) are often a “fund of funds,” investing in a group of other mutual funds. One popular example is a target-date fund, which automatically chooses and reallocates assets toward safer investments as you approach retirement age.

These include a mix of value and growth stocks, or those that offer strong earnings growth.

Bond funds are typically less risky than stock funds. There are many different types of bonds, so you should research each mutual fund individually in order to determine the amount of risk associated with it.

These products often have the lowest returns because they carry the lowest risk. Money market funds are legally required to invest in high-quality, short-term investments that are issued by the U.S. government or U.S. corporations.

When you buy into a mutual fund, your investment can increase in value in three ways:

When a fund receives dividends or interest from the securities in its portfolio, it distributes a proportional amount of that income to its investors. When purchasing shares in a mutual fund, you can choose to receive your distributions directly, or have them reinvested in the fund.

When a fund sells a security that has gone up in price, this is a capital gain. (And when a fund sells a security that has gone down in price, this is a capital loss.) Most funds distribute any net capital gains to investors annually. In a year with high capital gains payouts, investors may see a large tax bill, especially high-net-worth individuals who will pay higher capital gains tax rates.

Mutual fund share purchases are final after the close of market, when the total financial worth of the underlying assets is valued. The price per mutual fund share is known as its net asset value, or NAV. As the value of the fund increases, so does the price to purchase shares in the fund (or the NAV per share). This is similar to when the price of a stock increases — you don’t receive immediate distributions, but the value of your investment is greater, and you would make money should you decide to sell.

With so many different types of investments out there, it can be difficult to choose which ones are right for you. Here is a quick comparison between three of the most popular types of investments.

Source for fee information: The Investment Company Institute, Trends in the Expenses and Fees of Funds ^[0]