Investing For Profits, Part One - The Easiest Way to Improve Your Results

Are most of your savings in an IRA? And are those savings invested mostly in mutual funds? Read on to discover why this is not necessarily the best way to make your money grow -- or even to keep it safe. Instead, read on for a simple technique that will give you far better results than you're likely getting right now.

The traditional approach of retirement funds involves investing in mutual funds. Those are funds that include a hundred or more different stocks that have been selected to match certain specifications.

Some of those funds may focus on large cap stocks, which means stocks of companies with a great deal of assets . Others might focus on mid cap stocks. And then there are funds for certain industries as well as international funds.

Which funds are selected -- and which stocks within those funds -- is often based on past performance and other criteria. Unfortunately, as most funds are careful to point out in their small print, past performance is never a guarantee for future performance.

And when something unexpected happens, you -- or even your funds' managers -- may react emotionally, be it based on fear when the market goes down, or on hope when it goes up. Either way, you or the managers may end up switching your funds around accordingly. And that might not be in your best interest.

In fact, the managers might sell and buy the individual stocks that are in the funds based on similar rationales. Unfortunately, this kind of "strategy," if it could even be called that, doesn't usually lead to consistent growth, and it can even put your money at risk.

Too many investors and even advisors base their decisions on emotions. It might work in matters of the heart, at least to some degree, but it definitely doesn't work when it comes to investing.

As a result, you may be shocked to discover that 80 percent of advisors can't even beat the benchmarks of their funds. Their funds do worse than the comparable index funds. You'd be better off just buying an index fund like the S&P 500 rather than to take your chances with most mutual funds.

And it gets even worse: the managed funds will actually cost you money for administration and advertising as well as other expenses -- and those fees and expenses are deducted from its yield. Now, if you consider that their results may well be below what you would have gotten with an index fund, you can see what will happen to your bottom line. You'll make a whole lot less money than you would have made even if you had simply stuck with an index fund.

The good news is that you don't need a lot of money to start investing in index funds that will make your money grow significantly faster than most funds will. So if your financial means are limited, you may want to get some advice on which kinds of index funds might be good choices, and how best to include them in your overall investment strategy.