Recommend this page to a friend. Our panel of experts answers your mutual fund questions. Some are off by 40 percent or more, shocking investors to the core. Investors tend to think of funds as stodgy but relatively safe.
Few people bother to look at what a fund actually owns.
But mutual funds are stocks and bonds - baskets of them, in various mixes. How well a fund does depends on which securities it buys. It may or may not behave in the way its name implies. Take utilities funds. They think of regulated companies, paying dividends and delivering heat and light.