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[MSE Dan]

In the Discount Brokers article, which discusses the cheapest way to buy investment funds, there are a few suggestions of where to start finding out about funds - the Sunday papers or online research tool Trustnet.

But what are your favourite ways to find idea about what to invest in? Please share your top tips with other Moneysavers.

[munk]

Finding funds is also known as 'screening' - you 'screen' out the funds based on a set of criteria such as the sector the fund is in, past performance, manager performance, initial charges, the minimum allowed investment and so on. In this way you can 'weed out' the funds you're not interested in from those that you are.

There are a number of sites that allow you to screen funds - some of the better sites around at the moment in my opinion for screening are:

• Trustnet - good for screening by sector and on fund performance over many different time periods (see below).
• Morningstar - used by many big fund companies for their excellent data feeds. Allows screening of funds by many different criteria.
• Citywire - perhaps best known for their 'A' rating system for fund managers, good for comparing fund managers.
• Bestinvest - Bestinvest are an independent financial advisor (IFA), although they also provide a great deal of good research on a lot of funds. They focus well on fund manager career performance, not just on how well a fund has performed - this is a good thing - for example if a not so great fund manager has just taken over control of a previously excellent fund due to the old manager retiring.

Each of the above sites have slightly different ways of screening funds, I'll try and give a step by step example of how to screen out funds from a single sector on Trustnet and look at how to sort the funds in a sector based on their past performance over various time periods.

Important: the usual disclaimer applies, past performance is no indication of future returns. This kind of technique is only a very very basic first step I find useful for getting an overview of the different funds within a sector and how they've performed compared to each other over different time periods.

Usually I use it as a quick overview, trying to find the funds that have consistently outperformed over a number of different time periods. Importantly though I always go on to focus in on individual funds, reading the literature for the funds, manager history, portfolio breakdowns etc etc (each of those needs a dedicated guide as well!) before making any decision on whether to invest or not.


Trustnet - screening funds by sector, sorting by performance over different time periods:
To start with, browse to:

http://www.trustnet.com/ut/funds/sectors.aspx

This page lists a number of different IMA sectors from where you can focus in on any that you're particularly interested in - for example if you're interested in Cautious Managed funds, you'd click on the Cautious Managed link from where you can then view all the funds in the Cautious Managed IMA sector.

Before doing that though, there's a useful way to see which sectors have performed best over each of the various time periods.

To sort all sectors over a 1 year period from best performing sector to worst:

• Scroll down to the part of the page that says 'IMA sectors / Performance'.
• Click on the link that says 1y (<- click and scroll down to see the sorted list!).

The sectors will now be sorted in order of which has performed best over 1 year. You can sort by 1/3/6 months or 1/3/5 years. This can be useful for getting a rough overview of which sectors have done best over various time periods.

Sorting a sector by performance over various time periods
Now move on to look at a specific sector. Click on a sector you're interested in looking at funds for - ie:

Active Managed

This will take you to a page with a lot of useful info on the Active Managed sector.
On that page, click on the link that says:

View all constituents

This will take you to a page that lists all funds within the Active Managed sector.
From that page you can then go on to sort the funds based on their performance over various time periods - like above for sorting the 'sectors' by performance.

For example to sort the list of funds from best performing to worst performing over 1 year, click on the 1y link.

I find it best to try sorting the funds over different time periods and looking to see which are consistently at the top of the performance table over all time periods (1/3/5 year).

Note: you can also add extra columns to the table to allow you to sort by 1/3/6 months - click on the button that says 'Customise this table' and choose which columns you want available to sort by.

Looking at individual funds on Trustnet
Finally, Trustnet has a lot of good information about how each fund has performed over 1 and 3 years. This information is packed concisely into the top right hand corner of each fund's page on Trustnet and 'colour coded' to allow you to see at a glance how a fund has performed compared to it's peers within the sector over each time period (from blue for best or 'top quartile' (top 25% of all funds in the sector) down to red for worst or 'bottom quartile' (bottom 25% of all funds in the sector).

I find this very useful for getting a quick idea at a glance how a fund has done over 1/3 years and whether it's worth having a closer look at the fund's credentials.


All in all a lot of blurb for something that takes about 10 seconds to actually do!

The other sites listed above all have similar functionality - especially Morningstar's Fund Screener (tip - select 'UK Domiciled Funds' from the 'Universe' dropdown to only show UK funds in the screen results).

[RayWolfe]

A great "primer". Thanks.
The only criticism that I would make is Morningstar's peculiar (American) category list.

[purch]

What are your favourite ways to find investments?

Me ???

I just ask Munk................let him do all the hard work for me

[MSE Dan]

Cheers Munk - some really useful stuff there

[runciblespoon]

Hargreaves Lansdown provide the Wealth 150: a pre-screened list of funds of what they believe to be the best funds. The list is screened according to their research criteria and reviewed periodically.

I wouldn't use it as the only source of fund ideas, but it's a useful starting point with some of the dross filtered out. Note however that they're all actively managed funds - you won't find passive trackers or ETFs on the list (partly because H-L apply a surcharge to some cheap trackers so they cease to be such good value).

Of course you don't need to use H-L as your broker to take ideas from the Wealth 150. There's the same list on a different engine at Yahoo.

(I'd be interested to know if there's an archive of past Wealth 150s available, to see which funds have come into favour and which out of favour)

[munk]

Here are my keyword bookmarks for Firefox to allow me to quickly search for any fund containing a query string on Hargreaves Lansdown, Morningstar, Trustnet, Citywire, Bestinvest and Yahoo:

hls:
http://www.h-l.co.uk/fund_research/fund_search.hl?func=search&formid=1003&company=&x=0&y=0&sector=&investment=%s

mss:
http://www.morningstar.co.uk/UK/fundquickrank/default.aspx?search=%s

tns:
http://www.trustnet.com/general/search.asp?strText=%s&scope=ut

cw:
http://www.citywire.co.uk/adviser/search.aspx?Phrase=%s

bis:
http://www.bestinvest.co.uk/funds/fmpro?-DB=webprices.fp5&-Lay=fund_info&-format=fundperflist.htm&-error=fundperflist.htm&-SortField=invname&-max=200&-find=&calc_fundtype=open&groupcode=&invname=%s&fundsize=&netyield=&calcsector=&assetclass=&Theme=&portfolio_turnover=&fundmanager%3A%3Amanagername=&-op=gt&manterm=&initial+charge+best=&total_ann_cost+charge+best=

ys:
http://uk.finsearch.yahoo.com/uk/index.php?s=uk_sort&nm=%s&tp=F&r=L&sub=Look+Up

bls:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=%s

So for example to search for any funds with the string 'Threadneedle' in them I type the following in the location bar in Firefox and I'm automatically given a list of all Threadneedle funds on the respective site. Saves a lot of faffing around.

'hls Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Hargreaves Lansdown site)

'mss Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Morningstar site)

'tns Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Trustnet site)

'cw Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Citywire site)

'bis Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Bestinvest site)

'ys Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Yahoo site)

'bls Threadneedle'
(searches for Threadneedle on Bloomberg site)


There's a good explanation of Firefox keywords here:

http://lifehacker.com/software/bookm...ing-196779.php
(the important bit is in the section 'Keyword search and the %s variable')

The official 'smart keywords' page is here:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/fire...-keywords.html
(doesn't go into a lot of detail though).

[dunstonh]

(I'd be interested to know if there's an archive of past Wealth 150s available, to see which funds have come into favour and which out of favour)

I know someone that has got some of the old lists and they say that the list is nothing more than whats the best sellers, fashion investing and best past performers of that period. I dont have a list so cannot add any further comment to that.

[moneylover]

The Wayback Machine has archived Wealth 150 pages between Dec 06 and Aug 07 and will presumably continue to do so - its about six months delay before a page gets into the internet archive
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://.../wealth_150.hl

You have to make sure you are looking at a fully archived date see this from the faqs:

"Not every date for every site archived is 100% complete. When you are surfing an incomplete archived site the Wayback Machine will grab the closest available date to the one you are in for the links that are missing. In the event that we do not have the link archived at all, the Wayback Machine will look for the link on the live web and grab it if available. Pay attention to the date code embedded in the archived url. This is the list of numbers in the middle; it translates as yyyymmddhhmmss. For example in this url http://web.archive.org/web/200002291...www.yahoo.com/ the date the site was crawled was Feb 29, 2000 at 12:33 and 40 seconds. "