What Stocks Are In My Mutual Fund?

Ever wonder what companies your fund is investing in? Some investors don't really care. They know that most funds are diversified and that's all that matters. For others, they want to have an idea of what kinds of stocks and bonds are held, as well as how much of the fund is allocating to cash. Mutual fund holdings are a bit tricky to research, and surprisingly there's little to no info when I Googled the question. This blog post will give investors a framework to pop the hood to reveal what stocks are in their mutual funds.

Case Study: T. Rowe Price Equity Index 500 Fund (Ticker Symbol PREIX)

Suppose you own or were thinking of buying this fund. The first thing you might do is execute a Google search. The first two search results are T. Rowe Price's own SITE, followed by the Morningstar SUMMARY. You might also scan down the first page of search results just to make sure there's nothing negative regarding the fund. If nothing bad catches your eye, it's probably safe to start perusing the fund information.

What The T. Rowe Price Site Says

You'll begin with the "Snapshot" tab. Here you'll find ratings and performance metrics, which most fund companies want to advertise right off the bat. Read more about investment advertising HERE. Clicking through the website tabs doesn't yield any results until you get to the Composition tab.

Characteristic of typical fund promotional info, T. Rowe Price has provided a list of the 10 largest holdings. This is a good start, but as you can see this only represents 17.50% of the total assets.

Let's See What Morningstar Says

Navigating to the Morningstar SUMMARY, we're provided with their "quote" page. It's a lot like what we first get at the T. Rowe Price site. There's a lot on this page, but if you scroll down about 2/3 of the way Morningstar lists the top 5 holdings, which represent 10.53% of the total assets.

Morningstar has a neat feature to help investors obtain a better sense of what stocks represent top holdings, as well as how many stocks comprise the fund. Almost hidden above the top holdings list is a "More..." link we can click.

Clicking the More... text brings us to an expanded analysis of the fund. What first catches our eye is the amount of Stock Holdings (507) and Other Holdings (5). That's cool! You now know how many positions the manager is taking.

Two other features on this page are the ability to mouse over the grey circles in the Equity Holdings Performance graph as well as a list of the top 25 holdings. Pretty cool, but we're still seeing only 30.03% of the fund's total assets. That's as far as a free subscription to Morningstar is going to take us. Note: paying Morningstar's subscription fee only gets you the top 100 holdings.

This Is Good, But I Want To Know Everything

This is where most folks give up, but many times the fund's PROSPECTUS will tell us where to continue our search. On page 34 of this fund's prospectus, we find the following:

Each T. Rowe Price fund’s portfolio holdings are disclosed on a regular basis in its

semiannual and annual shareholder reports, and on Form N-Q, which is filed with

the SEC within 60 days of the fund’s first and third fiscal quarter-end. The money

funds also file detailed month-end portfolio holdings information with the SEC each

month. Such information will be made available to the public 60 days after the end of

the month to which the information pertains.

Luckily, we don't have to search the SEC site for this particular fund's filings. T. Rowe Price provides a LINK on the right side of the summary page. Finally, the document we've been hunting for! Now we just have to sort through 80 pages to find what we're looking for. Pages 27-48 show us exactly what we're looking for. T. Rowe Price even breaks down the holdings by category.

Take Away

Unless you have trouble falling asleep at night, I don't recommend going through the trouble of tracking down all this detail. Our time is probably better spent with our families, getting in a workout, or sleeping! What I would recommend you do is eyeball the top holdings for a general understanding of the typical fund holdings. What a fun conversation topic at your next cocktail party! :)

If you're an overly analytic type you might find the whole process interesting, as would investors seeking greater transparency with their SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENTS. If you're neither type of person, then trust your financial advisor has done their due diligence knowing what their recommended funds are actually investing in. If their answer is wishy washy, they probably have no clue. Most likely they picked the funds BASED ON PAST PERFORMANCE- not the most ideal method to select funds.