The funds themselves report their basic information daily, and research firms including Lipper Inc. and Morningstar Inc. calculate the performance and cost as well as assign rankings. Generally, a family of funds needs assets of $5 billion or so to stay alive. Otherwise, it's vulnerable to a takeover by a larger, more aggressive fund.
The mutual fund company's name appears first, followed by its different funds listed in alphabetical order.
r after the fund name means the fund charges a fee to redeem shares for cash. That charge may disappear after you have held your shares for a specific period of time, which the fund identifies.
p after the fund name means the fund charges a fee for marketing and distribution costs, also known as 12b-1 fees.
t after the fund name means both r and p apply: You pay redemption fees and 12b-1 fees.
NAV is the fund's net asset value. A fund's NAV is the dollar value of one share in the fund, and the price a fund pays you per share when you sell. It's figured by totaling the value of all the fund's holdings and dividing by the number of existing shares. For example, the NAV of the Blue Chip fund is $30.63.
A fund's NAV moves up or down to reflect market conditions, though the short-term changes are rarely dramatic. Those changes are reported for each trading day, as are year-to-date yields.
Total return is the percentage of gain (+) or loss (-) the fund has provided, assuming all distributions have been reinvested. This chart reports those figures for 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10-year periods as well as for the previous month. An NS in
a column indicates that the fund wasn't operating at the beginning of
the period.
Investment objectives, expressed as a two-letter abbreviation in the column following the fund's name, identify the type or types of investments the fund makes. A chart identifying each of the categories and what each buys is printed in the monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews. The example highlighted here, EU, indicates a fund investing in Europe.
R stands for ranking. The return each fund has provided is compared with the results for other funds with the same investment objective.
The ranking code assigns an A to funds that rank among the top 20%, a B to the next 20%, and so on, with an E indicating the bottom 20%. When a fund with a higher total return gets a lower rating than a fund with a lower return, as with the one-year returns on the Balanced and Blue Chip funds, it is because they have different objectives. Some funds receive similar rankings for all periods, like the Balanced fund, while others, like the Blue Chip fund, have less consistent rankings.
Here, for example, the total return on ABC Funds' Balanced Return fund is up 4.5% over one year, and an average of 13% over three years and 12.3% over ten years.
Many mutual funds charge a load, or sales charge, when you buy shares. Loads are a percentage of the investment amount and may be charged when you buy, when you sell, or throughout the period you own the fund. Funds that charge when you buy are often identified as Class A shares, as the ABC Funds are. When those charges apply, they are listed in the column labeled maximum initial charge. If 0.00 appears, the fund is a no-load. Funds that impose a sales charge when you sell are known as Class B shares, and those that impose an annual fee are Class C shares.
Load charges are not included in the fund's total return. The asset-based annual expenses you pay are figured in and reported as expense ratio. Trading fees are not reported. The differences in return among funds with the same investment objective can be influenced by the fees they charge.
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