In a nutshell, professional management, diversification, safety, liquidity, and service. If you were to manage your own portfolio of stocks, you'd have to research, select, and monitor thousands of securities to construct a diversified portfolio of stocks. There's an easier way. Mutual funds offer numerous advantages to individual investors, including toll-free switching, checking privileges, automatic dividend and capital gains reinvestment, and trained customer service reps.

ICR is grateful for, and well-equipped to receive, gifts of publicly traded stocks and mutual funds. Many choose to give appreciated stock or property and find it not only of benefit to ICR, but to their own circumstance at tax time (please check with your tax adviser to reap the best benefits).

Start with Kiplinger.com, which offers reams of statistical data. Try Yahoo! Finance for links to annual reports, quarterly statements and shareholder conferences with management. To help put the statistics in context, Research Wizard, at MSN Moneycentral, lets you see how one stock stacks up against its peers based on different statistics. Use Research Wizard to compare funds, too. Another great online tool is PriceWaterhouseCoopers's Edgarscan.

Sure, but you will have to manually enter a complete EOD quote (OHLCV). Some people think this is sort of a redundant effort, since many fund managers use technical analysis on the underlying stocks, anyway. Lots of others do it, though. Each could involve a number of different data formats, depending upon just what is available, or usable: complete/partial exchanges, portfolios, intra-day and/or EOD quotes, indices, histories, etc., are all possible.

A mutual fund refers to a collective investment scheme under which professional fund managers pool money from individual investors and manage it according to pre-set investment objectives. The investment objectives can range from maximizing capital gains to maintaining a stable stream of income, and from beating inflation to preserving capital.

Ideally, your fund roster should have more players than a basketball team but no more than a baseball team. For your starting five, a diversified lineup would be funds representing these types of stocks: large, fast-growing companies; smaller fast-growing companies; large companies selling at bargain prices; smaller companies selling as bargains; and foreign companies.

Morningstar has both basic and Premium screeners for stocks and funds. Basic Stock Screener and Basic Fund Screener allow you to sort through our stock or fund databases using commonly requested criteria. Premium Stock Screener and Premium Fund Screener offer a more powerful search, allowing you to screen on hundreds of data points and providing well-defined results.

Your investment horizon can be broadened because there are different types of funds that can provide a convenient and cost effective way to capitalize on both local and overseas investment opportunities. Diversification may take different forms, e.g. along geographic or industry lines, or amongst different securities or issuers.

Annual management fees are usually allocated from the fund on a daily basis and will not constitute an out-of-pocket expense for investors. They vary among different types of funds.

Settlement requirements for mutual funds vary. Some funds such as money market funds may require cleared fund whereas the others require three to five business days for settlement. Please contact our Investment Service Centres 8:00 a.m. Monday through 4:00 p.m. Saturday at (852) 2902 3888 in Hong Kong or (65) 6327 2288 in Singapore for more information.

The drawbacks with mutual funds are that you have no control on the investments of the fund; and, more importantly, the downside of diversification is that a fund can hold so many stocks that a tremendously great performance by a stock will make very little difference to a fund's overall performance.

Mutual funds have many benefits. They offer an easy and inexpensive way for an individual to get returns from stocks and bonds without: incurring the risks involved in buying them directly; needing the capital to buy quality stocks; or having the expert knowledge to make the right buy/sell decisions.

All Asset Management Companies (AMCs) are regulated by SEBI and/or the RBI (in case the AMC is promoted by a bank). In addition, every Mutual Fund has a board of directors that represents the unit holders' interests in the Mutual Fund.

Although past performance is no guarantee for the future, it is a useful way of assessing how well or badly a fund has performed in comparison to its stated objectives and peer group. A good way to do this would be to identify the five best performing funds (within your selected investment objectives) over various periods, say 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years and 3 years.

Release of the discovery is so new I don't believe others have had much opportunity to incorporate it into their trading strategies. Eventually I can conceive of an environment where The Taylor Effect will become a required tool for the financially informed. Accurate market trend forecasts were not available until now. Today, investment advisors and individual investors will have an incredible advantage they never had before.

Yes. Currently our branches in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia are licensed to do so. Branch locations for those provinces can be found here: http://www.cwbank.com/branches.

You avail of the services of experienced and skilled professionals who are backed by a dedicated investment research team. Investing in a Mutual Fund reduces paperwork and helps you avoid many problems such as bad deliveries, delayed payments and unnecessary follow up. Over a medium to long-term, Mutual Funds have the potential to provide a higher return as they invest in a diversified basket of selected securities.

Click on the link "Buy Now" in the MF Trading section. You will be asked to select from the various mutual fund houses. Select the fund house. You will now see all the schemes of the fund house. Select the mutual fund scheme that you wish to invest in. After that choose the amount that you wish to invest in and make an online payment through your Indian bank account or your US bank account through ACH pay mode of remit2india.

Many people purchase mutual funds because they are a convenient and cost effective method of obtaining diversification and professional management. Because mutual funds hold anywhere from a few securities to several thousand, risk is spread out over a number of investments. Additionally, mutual funds generally buy and sell securities in volume, which allows investors to benefit from lower trading, management and research costs.