Online Investing Hacks

Download Mutual Fund Data

Mutual fund companies feed their features and statistics to the companies that provide you with mutual fund reports, so you won’t find much of a difference between mutual fund numbers from web site to web site. However, each web site tweaks its presentation of data to make it easier to find data. After you decide which web site you prefer, use Excel web queries [Hack #7] to download data into a spreadsheet, refreshing the data whenever you want or grabbing data for another mutual fund.

Picking the Data Behind Door Number One or Door Number Two

Two web sites duke it out as the top dogs of mutual fund data, and they both offer data from Morningstar. Whether you choose Morningstar (http://www.morningstar.com/Cover/Funds.html) or Yahoo! Finance (http://biz.yahoo.com/funds/) depends on the analysis you want to perform and the comparisons you want to make. In fact, because the data that these sites offer is so similar, you can download data from either site, collecting the data from the site that makes it easier to get what you want.

It’s no surprise that Morningstar.com offers Morningstar data. Morningstar offers two versions of its data—one for free and the other by subscription. You can analyze mutual funds quite well with Morningstar’s free data, so we’ll focus on that data in this hack. When you evaluate mutual funds, the salient features boil down to expenses, turnover, manager tenure, and total returns (tax-adjusted, load-adjusted, or as is). As it ...