How To -- Fund Families

There are seven momentum ranking tables that I posted every week. I started this site in 2004 with 2 families of mutual funds, SSPP and SELECT. Later in 2005, I added the ranking table of ETF due to the popularity of exchange traded funds. SSPP is made up of 31 Fidelity mutual funds in my company's 401k plan at that time,and SELECT has 40 funds from Fidelity's SELECT sector fund group. ETF table was formed by 41 indexed funds which investor can buy and sell from any discount brokage house. I did not have a specific criteria for including a fund into the ranking table other than pick a few funds in different investment styles, differenct industrial and regional sectors. In doing so, I may overlook a few good performance funds. However, the intention is to capture the different sector or global regional growth trends at the different phases of economy cycle and trade the funds accordingly. As long as the funds in the family can cover as much as the whole economy

sectors with enough volatility, we should be able to profit from them with above market average return.

In 2007, my company changed the makeup of the funds in our 401k plan and reduced the number of Fidelity mutual funds. The reason I used only the Fidelity mutual funds in SSPP was that their price can be tracked publicly so that I can automate the ranking generation. In the new plan, a lot of fund prices can only be quoted through the plan and can not be found elsewhere. To overcome this change, I developed the rankings for all the funds in the new 401k plan, downloaded their price every week manually and posted them as nSSPP while keeping the old ranking table.

In addition to the change of SSPP, the popularity of exchange traded funds grew exponentially and more funds were offered by different large fund companies. After some studies, I added the sETF and iETF ranking tables to the weekly postings. sETF contains 40 sector index funds and iETF contains 30 international index funds. In general, funds in ETF, sETF and iETF have higher volatily and subjected to higher risk.

This year I started to post the rankings of the funds in my company's Health Saving Account (HSA) plan. There are only 15 funds in the plan and most them charge more than 5 % of transaction fee for every purchase. although the fund company will waive the transaction fee if you make the trade through the plan. If you are not in the HSA plan, I do not recommend you to trade these funds because of their high loads.