How to Research Mutual Funds With Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance offers a user-friendly approach to researching and managing your finances. You can use Yahoo Finance to research stocks, mutual funds and companies. Yahoo Finance is a free, easy-to-use service offered by Yahoo.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Computer with Internet access

Research Mutual Funds With Yahoo Finance

1. Go to Yahoo's home page and click on the 'Finance' link in the list of services (see Resources below) to get to the Yahoo Finance home page. On the Finance home page, look for the box with the text inside that says 'Enter Symbol(s).' If you know the symbol for the mutual fund you want to research, enter it into the provided field, and then click on the 'Get Quotes' button. You will be taken to a page of information about the fund.
2. Click on the 'Look Up Symbol' link to perform a search using the name of the mutual fund you want to research if you don't already know the symbol. When the symbol appears, click on it to view a profile of the mutual fund.
3. View the information listed on your mutual fund. You can see information like the current value, trading time and percentage change in value. Note that quotes are not real-time. Quotes are delayed 15 minutes during market trading hours.
4. Click on the various links available on the Quotes page to further research your mutual fund.

Use the Mutual Funds Center on Yahoo Finance

5. Go to the Yahoo Finance home page (see Resources below) and find the 'Investing' tab. Choose 'Mutual Funds' from the pull-down menu. This will bring you to the Mutual Funds Center.
6. Use the navigation links in the Features box to access tools for researching mutual funds. For example, you can click on the 'Morningstar Editorials' link to access a page with links to information, advice and opinions from Morningstar.
7. Educate yourself about mutual funds by clicking on links in the Education section of the Features box. For example, click on the link that says 'Types Of Mutual Funds' to bring up a page with links to articles on different categories.
8. Go to the Yahoo Finance Help center (see Resources below) and click on the 'Mutual Funds' link. This will bring up a page with links to pages that provide definitions of common terms you will encounter when researching mutual funds.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep in mind that updates to mutual funds quotes are sent to Nasdaq once a day, around 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Yahoo Finance reports mutual fund quotes based on the previous day's value until updates are reported to Nasdaq that day.
• For account security, choose a password for your Yahoo account that will not be too easy for other people to guess (e.g., do not choose a pet or child's name).