Bullitt

There are literally hundreds of thousands of investment newsletters, stock pickers, fund managers, and market timers out there that charge yearly subscription fees for people like us to obtain market insight. I'm not going to get into any specific paid services or my individual reviews on the services I do subscribe to, but I have found a few hidden gems out there for those who may not want to try a subscription based service due to cash constraints.

I'm sure most of us can agree that mutual funds probably stand to be the most common vehicle for the retail investor to have exposure to 'The Market' these days. While TSP offers only Index Funds, there probably are plenty of TSP'ers who own a few mutual funds whether they be in a Roth or Trad IRA, rolled over from a prior job, or simply sitting in a taxable account in hopes of helping to pay for that home addition or dream vacation some day. In mutual fund investing you're largely betting on the jockey, not the horse. In other words, you're giving your money to a fund manager who you think is going to at least match his benchmark (but deep down you really want to see him outperform).

There are some managers I follow on a quarterly basis meaning, I check up on whether they switched funds, see the changes to their top 20 holdings, etc. because it gives me an idea for what's maybe coming into flavor and what's moving out.

A site like Morningstar is an excellent place to start. There is plenty to read and learn from their free access areas. However, if you want to get down to their individual mutual fund analyst reviews, you'll have to subscribe to the site. As an alternate, www.fundalarm.com is probably the closest you can get to free mutual fund analysis there is without having to pay monthly subscription fees. The author of this site does a great job keeping up with management shakeups at the funds he follows and provides an excellent monthly commentary at www.fundalarm.com/hilights.htm. In his commentary he provides options for funds closed to new investors, new fund releases, and his detailed analysis of each individual fund he follows.

While this site may help direct you in a good direction when it comes to picking quality fund managers, it can also assist investors in deciding whether they should consider selling their fund by clicking on the 3-alarm fund data table and entering individual fund tickers.

Maybe the site follows your fund manager and can give you a few good investing tips.

-I will be posting mainly on the blog from now on as my account talk will be specifically for my TSP account changes. Any of your comments and questions are welcome.

Thanks for checking in.

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Disclosure: No affiliation to www.fundalarm.com.