Investor Basics

The Value of Currency

May 7, 2013

For U.S. investors, the performance of foreign funds and ETFs isn’t based only on how much the fund’s underlying stocks or bonds increase or decrease; it’s also affected by the value of currency. Exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and foreign currencies can have a considerable effect on the returns of foreign funds and overseas [...]

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What are Secular Bull & Bear Markets?

April 18, 2013

The terms bull (up) and bear (down) market generally refer to cyclical gains or losses of 15% to 20% or more. Each up or down market cycle generally lasts from several months to a few years. Over 10 to 20 year periods, the stock market cycles through multiple bull and bear markets. These longer term [...]

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Getting Started (Part 4) – Investing

January 31, 2013

Many investors use a New Year as a time to get their investments in order. To help, we’re launching a series of posts to help investors who are just getting started with a new investment program. We’ve looked at the importance of having a plan, why investors need stocks, bonds and cash, and how to [...]

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Getting Started (Part 3) – Allocating to Stocks and Bonds with NoLoad FundX

January 29, 2013

Many investors use a New Year as a time to get their investments in order. To help, we’re launching a series of posts to help investors who are just getting started with a new investment program. So far, we’ve looked at the importance of having a plan, and why investors need stocks, bonds and cash. [...]

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Getting Started (Part 2): Stocks, Bonds and Cash

January 24, 2013

Many investors use a New Year as a time to get their investments in order. To help, we’re launching a series of posts to help investors who are just getting started with a new investment program. First, we looked at the importance of having a plan. Now, we consider the building blocks of a portfolio: [...]

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Getting Started (Part 1): Have a Plan

January 22, 2013

Many investors use the New Year as a time to get their investments in order. To help, we’re launching a series of posts to help investors get invested. We’ll look at allocating your portfolio to stocks and bonds, and how get back in the market. But the very first step is to have a plan. [...]

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Understanding Fund Expenses

May 31, 2012

To understand fund expenses, you first need to understand how a fund’s net asset value (NAV), or share price, is calculated. A fund’s NAV is the current market value of a fund’s holdings minus the fund’s expenses and divided by the total number of outstanding shares. The “minus the fund’s expenses” part is important: it [...]

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On Forbes: Active and Passive Investing

May 29, 2012

In a new post on the Forbes Intelligent Investing blog, NoLoad FundX editor Janet Brown explores the challenges and consequences of active and passive investing. “By owning index funds, passive investors have the comfort of knowing they’ll never underperform the indexes they own, but they also give up the possibility of ever outperforming those indexes,” [...]

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Learning about Load Funds

May 22, 2012

When we first started publishing NoLoad FundX in 1976, load funds were very common and it was challenging to get reliable performance data on noload funds. But in recent years, that trend has reversed and investors have put twice as much money into shares of noload funds than load funds, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) [...]

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On Forbes: Why Stocks are Still the Best Long-Term Investment

May 17, 2012

Bonds have performed so strongly that some investors now question “why they should take the risk of investing in stocks if lower risk bonds have higher rewards,” Janet Brown writes in her latest post for the Forbes Intelligent Investing blog. Janet looks back at the long-term returns of stocks versus bonds from 1925 through 2011 [...]

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