[net.consumers] Mutual Funds

de@moscom.UUCP (Dave Esan) (09/19/85)

I recently have had some bad experiences with the people at IDS.  This mutual
fund was set up when I was born, so I had no real choice in the company.

Now that I'm fed up with IDS, and Consumer Reports says that IDS is in the
bottom 150 of its 500 mutual funds, I want to change companies.  I would
be interested in anyone's opinions of the various mutual funds, and your
experiences with them.

You can mail to me, and I will summarize to the net.

Thanks.

David Esan (!ritcv!moscom!de)
[How do you get to ritcv? Try allegra.]

tplee@sftig.UUCP (T.P.Lee) (09/25/85)

Recent Forbes has an annual review of all kinds of mutual funds.  This
report is quite readable even for those who are not up-to-date about
mutual fund operations.
My experiences with a few of the top funds listed there partially
confirm myself that this report is worth keeping around until next year.

	T. Paul Lee
	attunix!tplee

de@moscom.UUCP (Dave Esan) (10/13/85)

My deep thanks to all those people who responded to my request for
information about mutual funds.  I have include their letters at the
end of this posting.

Most people suggested that I check the Forbes Honor Roll, a project
I shall under shortly.  The analysis of funds is as follows:

                             comments
	name             positive  negative
	Value Line         1	     1
	Windsor 	   2
	Vanguard	   3
	Delaware           1
	Fidelity           1
	20th Century       1
	Kemper                        1
	Hutton                        1
	Dean Witter                   1



Thanks again.


David Esan


===========================================================================
I have a small amount of money ($2000) invested in three of the
Value Line Funds.  I chose them because they were rated highly by
Money magazine when I was investing.  Unfortunately, the market
slid down, and when it went up, Value Line Funds didn't do so
well.  For a brief shining moment a couple of months ago, I was
making money.  I intended to keep the money in for a while, but
I would have been better off in a money market fund.  Moral:
take the ratings with a grain of salt.

My boyfriend has money in Windsor.  He's been pleased.  It has
been closed, so you'd have to try Windsor II.  Many of the Vanguard
funds are supposed to be pretty good.  

======================================================================

The Vanguard group and the Deleware group have served me very well.
The Windsor Fund for Vanguard has hit 18-22% per year for the past
10 years.  No other fund has done this well consistently.  They
offer check cashing priviledges and bank drafts.  Very good people
to work with.  My AT&T IRA is in the Windsor Fund.  It is closed now,
but there is a Windsor2 fund.

======================================================================

I have heard of several people who have had bad experiences with IDS. If
you are interested in mutual funds, get a copy of the Forbes magazine
annual survey of mutual funds.  This issue came out just a couple weeks
ago. It's interesting to see how funds such as those of IDS are rated.

Pick a mutual fund that is on the Forbes magazine Honor Roll. These are
funds that have been excellent performers in up and down markets over the
last 10 years. (The fund I have my IRA in has averaged over 20% over the
last 10 years.)

======================================================================

I deal with several families of funds and have no complaints about them
(Fidelity, 20th Century, Kemper and Vanguard).  I have 3 accounts with
Fidelity, 2 with 20th Century, a money market fund with Kemper (the best
paying money market fund to be found--unfortunately the rest of their 
funds are load funds), and 1 account with Vanguard.  As far as information
put out by the companies, Kemper and Fidelity send newsletters on a
quarterly basis, but they are nothing to write home about.  If you order
information from several companies, you'll be impressed with Vanguard's
effort to make the information easy to read (good layout) and easy
to understand.  I once started dealing with Value Line and dropped them.
Several reasons.  1.  They weren't paying what they said they were paying.
They would send me a statement saying my money market fund was earning
9% and only credit my account with 7%.
2.  A definite lack of professionalism.  The information they would send
looked like it was the 1 millionth copy of a copy.  And it wouldn't even
be lined up properly on the page.  3.  Customer service personnel knew
nothing whenever I called.  I would swear that I was speaking to the
trash man everytime I called.  4.  After closing my account with them,
an independant auditor sent me a letter saying that my account had not
been credited with the interest I was due.
(Gee, I tried to tell Value Line that for 18 months.)
Thus, they "re-opened" my
account.  I immediately wrote a check for the amount of interest due
me (I hadn't thrown away my money market checks).  However, some interest
had accumulated on the interest between the time they gave me the interest
and they received my check.  Now, every quarter, I get a statement
for $.005 on the 6 cents in the account (and growing!).  In their own
prospectus, they are suppose  to close any accounts which contain 
less than $1,000.00 for three consecutive months to reduce admin costs.
However, my account has had less than $1.00 in it for 3 years!
Furthermore, they send me a letter every year saying that I can pay
my annual $10.00 IRA fee by separate check or they will take it out
of my account.  They have some serious problems and I would not suggest
that anyone open an account with them.  And if someone has an account with
Value Line, they are helping to pay the $.22 to mail me my statement
for $.005 every quarter.  And who is paying my annual $10.00 IRA admin fee???

============================================================
I have IRAs and 403(b) accounts with Vanguard.  The latest Forbes
magazine has their annual mutual fund ratings; Vanguard "Explorer" is
on this year's honor roll; Vanguard "Windsor" has been on the honor
rolls of years gone by.  Unfortunately, both of those funds are closed
to new investors, though Vanguard has started similar funds with
different managers (Explorer II and Windsor II).

I did my first IRA without doing much thinking about it, putting $1000
into some Hutton and Dean Witter funds.  Dean Witter seemed pretty
incompetent at just keeping the figures straight.  This year they
accidentally temporarily moved $1000 out of my account and back in,
marking the money as a 1985 contribution to boot!  Anyway, those funds
had a back-end load on them too, which was a waste, but then I did
learn something from the experience.  I have since rolled that IRA
money into my Vanguard accounts.

The Forbes listings also include information on the overhead as a
percentage of assets.  Some funds are making use of a loophole (called
12b-1, I think) to charge advertising costs as overhead, all the while
pretending to be low-load/no-load.  The Hutton fund I was in was doing
this (sigh).

Overall, I have been pretty pleased with Vanguard.  I am no high roller
though, so my requirements are pretty basic.