predicting mutual fund closing price

[JohnEyles]

I'm sure lots of us, especially those like me who need to up their equity allocations,
are taking advantage of this little dip (aka. beginning of the end of life as we know it)
to move some monies into equity mutual funds. Most mutual fund trades seem to
go at a given day's buy/sell price if you place the trade by a certain time, typically
4pm Eastern.

My question is, is there a good way to accurately predict the closing price of a
mutual fund prior to 4pm, since typically the ticker price is updated only after
the markets close (a reason ETFs are somewhat preferable IMHO) ? For index
funds, I guess you simply look at the ticker price for the applicable index (since
of course it updates continuously throughout the trading day). But what about
actively-managed funds ?

[Sam]

Mutual funds list their top holding. So. you can create a portfolio containing those holding and track it in real time.

[LOL!]

I think it is pretty trivial to predict a mutual fund closing price. As you wrote, all you need to do is find the corresponding exchange-traded fund and see the percentage price movement about 15 minutes before the market close. Take that change and apply it to your mutual fund of the same asset class. Presumably you know the asset class of your actively managed fund, so finding the ETF is easy.

[Olav23]

You could also find the beta/r^2 on morningstar under the risk measures of the mutual fund. That will tell you how closely it mimics a given index. Then, compare against the index's price or ETF price. That'd give you a pretty close estimation, I would imagine.

[WanderALot]

Originally Posted by Sam

Mutual funds list their top holding. So. you can create a portfolio containing those holding and track it in real time.

Yahoo Finance already does this for you. They have a link on the Holdings page of the fund profile to "Get quotes on the top 10 holdings" and they tell you the percentage of total assets that the top 10 holdings take.

[mickeyd]

is there a good way to accurately predict the closing price of a
mutual fund prior to 4pm

Try this little head game for a while. Listen to the radio news and every hour on the hour they will announce (in this order) the Dow, NASDAQ and S&P current quote. Take notice of this and after you hear the Dow and NASDAQ immediately predict to yourself what the S&P quote will be (you will have about 1 second to decide). You will soon understand the relationship between the 3 quotes (hint: S&P can be gleaned from the first 2). You can then compare these results with your funds(s) and eventually you will recognize the relationship between your investments (generally) and these 3 metrics.

You may learn from this process how you can possibaly predict what the S&P will be.

A second option: flip a quarter and go with that. 8)

[Gonzo]

You can try: http://www.fundestimate.com/index.html

This is good for the following fund families:

Fidelity Selects
FOLIOfn
Invesco
Profunds
Rydex

Gonzo

[saluki9]

My first question is WHY? Is waiting until 4:00 that hard?

Secondly, the holdings info on yahoo and M* is usually out of date by the time it's published. Active funds have such high turnover that those listing are useless. In addition, most all fund managers do a little window dressing and sells the dogs before the list is published.