Why just no-load mutual funds ?
The historical performance of no-load mutual funds has equaled that of load funds over the past history of the mutual fund industry. According to Morningstar for 7,870 US stock funds through the end of April 2002, The annualized performance gain was 7.42% for load funds and 8.85% for no-load. Over 10 years it was 10.51% for loads and 11.55% for no-loads. So why pay load fees (sometimes as much as 7%) when you can get similar or superior performance from a no-load? There is a wide variety of superior no-load funds available. They lack entry and exit fees and so lend themselves more to trading if performance suffers. If invested in a load fund and you want to trade into a better fund because your performance is lagging, there is no sense to paying a 3 7% load penalty when this can easily be avoided. All no-load funds selected to be included in the Fund-Track rankings are highly rated.
