The Best Mutual Funds for Your Goals: The Kip 25
Investing editors Manny Schiffres and Nellie Huang took your questions about this year's picks for the Kiplinger 25.
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I wrote about how to get started with investing a couple of years ago for Kiplinger's "Starting Out" column. -
This is an issue we pay attention to with all the funds on our list. Contrafund, for instance, has $84 billion in assets. But it's a large-cap fund, investing in large-company stocks. And it continues to do well--Year to date, through last Friday, it's our best performing stock fund on the list: up 13% -
Thanks, Stacy. Slt, here is the archive of all of our Starting Out columns, which are aimed at 20-and-30-somethings. You might find the pieces on Roth IRA's, target date funds, and investing lessons for Generation Y particularly helpful. -
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Size really matters with funds that are investing in small-company stocks where the liquidity--i.e., the number of shares trading daily--is low. Once a fund manager starts to trade in and out of small stocks--in which he has a sizeable investment--he can influence the pricing of that stock. Manny have I articulated this well?
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Tar Heel, because I sent so much tuition money to Duke over the years, tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to make a project of collecting all of the Kip 25 updates since we started this feature 8 or 9 years ago and see how we come out. But for the reasons I mentioned before, the results are not going to be perfect. Send me a note at mschiffres@kiplinger.com and I'll get back to you with the results. And, yes, past performance doesn't predict future performance, which is why it's so improtant to hold down fees (one thing you can predict) and to never pay a load (sales charge)
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John60, you can use our Mutual Fund Finder to screen for funds based on 1-, 3-, and 5-year returns. Unfortunately, we don't have a screen for 10-year returns set up.
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If you're talking about ALL of the K25 funds, sure, you'd need to have more than one brokerage account. My feeling is that the technology has gotten so much better, especially the reporting of tax info (which you can download directly from the bigger brokerages), that I don't think you should sweat having a couple or three accounts if you really want access to all (or most of) these funds w/o transaction fees
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Marianne, to tell you the truth, I haven't looked at the managed payout funds lately, so I can't comment on them (Stacy, do we have a story from a year or two ago that you can post?). Re Wellesley Income, it's what I call an inverse balanced fund. The typical balanced fund is 2/3 stocks, 1/3 bonds. Wellesley is 1/3 stocks (big, dividend paying blue chips, primarily) and 2/3 high quality bonds. It has the advantage of low fees, typical for Vanguard. I guess my overall comment about the fund is that if you want that sort of asset allocation and you want blue chip stocks, it's a perfectly defensible way of getting that kind of exposure. In general, I prefer to arrive at the asset allocation decision first, then buy the best and most appropriate stock funds and the best and most appropriate bond funds for the desired allocation
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We hope you’ll join us again for more investing chats in the future, and if you’re looking for regular insights into the investing world, be sure to subscribe to Manny on Facebook: www.facebook.com
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Here's a piece on payout funds from Kiplinger's Retirement Report.
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