Portfolios

With your Yahoo! Finance Portfolio, you can actively monitor your mutual funds to ensure you keep as much of your profit as possible. Your portfolio pulls together all of the information you will need to stay on top of your funds and avoid being caught off guard by negative price movements. In one glance, you can see the price movement of every fund in your portfolio. To access the Portfolios video, click here.

However, though the main portfolio page offers a wonderful overview of the funds you are monitoring, you need to dig a little deeper. As a mutual-fund investor, the two portfolio components you will use most are the Charts and Profile features.

Charts Feature

The Charts video outlines a few of the technical tools—such as moving averages—you may want to utilize in your mutual-fund trading. For instance, if you are using a 50-period and a 200-period moving average, you would be watching for the danger sign of the 50-period moving average dropping below the 200-period moving average. When this happens, you know that your mutual fund is losing momentum, and it may be time to look for another place to invest your money. What you always have to remember is it is better to be in cash and miss a potential opportunity than to be in a bad trade with a guarantee of losing money.

Yahoo! Finance charts can also help you identify and invest with stop-loss levels. A stop-loss level is a pre-determined price point at which, if reached, you will sell your mutual fund. When you are trading stocks, you can actually set these orders to execute automatically through your broker ahead of time. With mutual funds, though, you will have to monitor these levels on your own. Because mutual funds only trade at the end of the day, your broker is unable to execute a stop-loss order during market hours.

You will hear various opinions as to where you should set your stop-loss levels. Some say you should never lose more than 10 percent on a trade, others say no more than 8 percent. Whichever level you decide to use, you can see if your mutual funds hit these levels by watching your charts.

Next Article: Profile Features and Conclusion >>

2 of 3   (1 2 3)