International Mutual Funds

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that there are four types of international mutual funds: The international funds, which invest only in well-known markets outside the U.S. such as Germany, France, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia; the global funds, which contain mixtures of U.S. and international stocks; the regional funds, which concentrate in geographic areas like Latin America, the Pacific Rim and Europe, with the concentration of these firms in small countries and emerging markets; and the country funds, which concentrate only on one country. The author points out that international funds are useful when it is felt that the U.S. market is not doing so well, and the emerging markets in the foreign countries are expected to perform better than the U.S. market. The paper relates that an important feature of international funds is that they give small investors an opportunity to invest in shares all over the world, an activity that would be very difficult or expensive to pursue on their own and that provides a good opportunity for diversification.

Table of Contents
Mutual Funds, the Dynamic Market
What is a Mutual Fund?
The Choice of International Funds
How Does One Know What the Fund is Doing?

From the Paper:

"The aim of any mutual fund is to pool in the money from different investors and put it in a position where it can be managed by professionals. The manager makes the trades, realizes the gain or loss, and collects the income in the form of dividend or interest. The gains or losses are then passed on to the individual investors. The operation of most funds are open-ended, and that means that the investment company is at liberty to issue new shares to investors, and also undertakes to buy back shares from investors who want to leave the fund. There are also close ended funs which issue a fixed number of shares, and only these can be bought or sold by the investors among themselves through a stock exchange. The person who has issued these closed funds is not responsible for redeeming them, so the trading of these has to be only through a broker."

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