These mutual funds not only offer the growth potential of stocks for less risk, they've bested the S&P as well.

When the average investor buys $10,000 of Class A shares in a load mutual fund, how much of that money actually gets invested in the market?

Selling mutual funds is a complicated business. Every day, financial advisers can choose from about 8,000 publicly available mutual funds in a variety of share classes to select ones that best match investors’ needs.

Vanguard has slashed the minimums on most of its Admiral shares from the old $100,000 level for first-time buyers to anywhere from $10,000 for index funds to $50,000 for actively managed funds. In the past, established Vanguard investors who'd held a fund for 10 years with a balance of $50,000 or more were allowed to convert to Admiral shares, but this move obviously opens up access to a far greater number of investors.

These five sectors have many different mutual funds tied to their respective fortunes, and investors have a variety of ways to take advantage of the trend higher in each sector.

The best funds in fund performance for the third quarter focused on precious metals and Latin America, as ranked by third-quarter return.

These five mutual funds have low Morningstar rankings but each could be on the brink of a breakout.

With the United States and other developed countries teetering on the brink of a double-dip recession, one place IRA investors and others can find growth is in emerging markets mutual funds.

There’s around $10.5 trillion invested in mutual funds, according to the Investment Company Institute and tragically, many investors own funds with undesirable characteristics. What are these mutual fund warning signs?

Bond yields are now spectacularly low, thanks to the double-dip recession scare that has gripped Wall Street over the summer. One of my favorite indicators, the deviation between the ten-year Treasury yield and its 52-week moving average, fell to -25% on August 19th.

Investors will pay any price these days, it seems, for investments they expect to hold up in dire economic times. There is no yield too low for Treasuries and money market funds, no price too high for gold. Bear market strategies abound. But health care stocks? Who needs ’em!

Stop the presses – a Fidelity fund with just $117.7 million in assets rated four stars out of five by Morningstar. A fund that has beaten the S&P 500 and its Morningstar Large Growth category over the past three and five year periods won’t fly under investors’ radar for long.