1.01.2007

Non-Ret: Large Cap Blend

My Pick: American Century Income & Growth/Inv BIGRX

So by now- you know my approach to picking each fund. I select the category in etrade'e mutual fund screener, sort by 3 year performance, cut and paste the performance, expenses, turnover ratio and a few other details into a spreadsheet, sort out the high expenses and high turnover from the top performers and look for a reason to choose a single fund from whatever is left over.

You can read some of the posts about the first seven funds I picked for this hypothetical portfolio so see the process in detail.

For Large Cap Blend funds, I did this and the T Rowe Price Retirement 2040 Fund/Adv PARDX stood out with a very low 0.25% expenses and 11% turnover ratio. But when looking at this in greater detail, I see that this fund invests in a 'bucket' of T Rowe Price funds each of which has its own expenses and turnover. This looks like a fund that attempts to do something similar to what I am doing with this hypothetical portfolio. This could be a decent fund to buy
if you wanted to invest in only one fund but since it holds funds that invest in various other categories I already have funds invested in, it does not make sense to buy it as a 'Large Cap Blend' fund.'

This leaves me with two choices:

Janus Fundamental Equity Fund JAEIX has done better than American Century Income & Growth/Inv BIGRX over a 3 year period but has trailed it recently. More relevant is that BIGRX has lower expenses, lower turnover and is more of a Large Cap blend- it is about half Large Cap Growth and Large Cap Value. JAEIX has a large Mid Cap Growth weight. It may out perform BIGRX if growth takes of soon as many predict, but this plan has a formula and is not trying to time the market so BIGRX is my pick.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

do you still trust this fund. looks like the manager is asleep at the wheel or after 18 years .. taken his long vacation