Is there a way that I can take the ticker symbol of a particular stock and see what mutual funds include it in their stock selection?
Mutual funds can change the stocks they hold on a daily basis. You’d need real time reporting to know for sure, and I don’t think anyone offers that. All the mutual funds report their holdings in different manners, so there’s no obvious way to collect all that data in a single place.
You could check if the stock is in an index, such as the Russell 2000 or the S&P 500. If so, the stock will be in the portfolio of associated index funds.
Not necessarily. Index funds attempt to mimic the erformance of the index. They don’t have to hold all the constituent shares to do that. They may be able to achieve 98% correlation with the index holding just a couple dozen issues
I’m not trying to be flippant, but I’m truly curious as to why you would like to know.
Most mutual funds have a ‘fund manager’ or ‘managers’. Guys that actively pick and chose on a daily basis which stocks the money flows into and out of.
Not to say they are out there picking just any old stocks each day. They do follow what their prospectus states about the fund. It may state something like:
Invests in mid- and large-cap companies based in the U.S.; typically holds 40-50 securities.
And give an objective like: Seeks long term capital preservation.
The thing is great funds have great managers, however, managers retire, move to other funds, etc.
So even though a fund may currently and historically be great (Joe’s mid-cap international fund), the manager may leave and you have no idea they just replaced him with Bob Green Rookie. You need to keep in touch with your funds and know what their doing and who’s running them.
I’m not the OP, but I can think of several reasons. MY reasons would be that there are several companies I don’t wish to invest in, even indirectly, such as tobacco companies.
I assumed that the index funds owned the exact mix of shares in the index. In fact, when an announcement is made that a company is going to be added to an index, there’s often a runup in the stock price because investors expect that the mutual fund companies will need to buy the stock to add it to their index funds.
You should look up “Ethical funds”, which pride themselves on avoiding companies the deal in tobacco, nuclear power, animal testing, etc.
When I do a Google, though, virtually all the hits are of Canadian origin, which may be due to my browser settings or that the phrase or concept hasn’t caught on in the U.S. I suppose an American could invest in a Canadian mutual fund (certainly the reverse is true) if nothing offered by U.S. financial companies looks worthwhile.
Another thing to do is to look at the company’s SEC filings. One of them lists the largest shareholders and usually one or more mutual fund companies are listed. Now that doesn’t narrow down ownership to a particular mutual fund, but once you know that, for example, Fidelity owns 25% of the company, you could call up Fidelity Investments and ask which of their funds are invested in that company.
Mutual funds also periodically issue a prospectus and/or a fact sheet. These documents, while far from providing a comprehensive listing of holdings (because as noted above, mutual fund holdings are very dynamic), will almost always give a breakdown of their top stock holdings. Rarely is more than a very few percentage points of a fund’s total value invested in any single issue. For instance, I’m looking at a fact sheet here for an AllianceBernstein fund. It lists the top ten holdings as a percentage of total value. These ten issues represent less than 30% of the total fund value and only one of them is more than 5%.
Go to Yahoo Finance and type in the stock symbol. Under the left hand menu, there is a link for ‘Major Holders’. At the bottom of the page there are the top institutional holders and top mutual fund holders. Please note that the listings can be dated. Probably from December of 2005. I think its reasonably accurate. Sure there is some turnover and window dressing in that time, but you should be fine.