It was about a decade ago when I got seriously interested in personal finance and investment. I read many investment books and all of Warren Buffet's shareholders letters. The world of investing is extremely confusing. This website constaints most of what I have learned. Hope you find it useful.
This site will start ranking no load mutual funds. Right now the best are:
1) Vanguard
2) Fidelity.
Vanguard is famous for having low fees. It is actually not a for-profit corporation but is in fact owned by its investors. So they keep dropping fees.
This site will cover the best no load mutual funds. But what parameters does a top fund exactly have? More importantly, we should first explain what exactly the type of mutual fund we will be discussing.
The popularity of no load mutual funds has skyrocketed in recent years. The big number most investors spend time spend all their time comparing are returns. What is often missed is performance net of fees. Fees aren’t everything but over the long term they can greatly affect financial results.
When an investor buys shares of a normal load fund, he is charged a sales commission to compensate the broker. There are various ways this can be done. The two most common are either “front-end” or “back-end” - charged when the fund is bought or sold respectively. They can be quite high and some funds charge as much as 8.5%. That means if you invest $1000 in a 8.5% front-end fund, $85 of your money is immediately deducted for sales commision and only $915 of your money is actually invested in the fund. This can greatly skew your investment peformance over both the short and long term. Many funds with front-ends are also adding 12b-1 fees (paid continuously, not a one-time fee) to go towards the cost of selling the funds.
In contrast, a no load investor pays no commission to buy into or sell out of the fund. There are two ways of doing this. You can go directly to the fund company, like Vanguard. Or you can go to a company like Charles Schwab and buy from their mutual fund “supermarket”. Many investors doing these days are choosing the second option. There is great convenience with a single account for all your mutual funds, with a single monthly statement. It also makes thins much easier when tax time rolls around.
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