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In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp and Motley Fool employee Amanda Kish discuss the factors to consider when evaluating mutual funds and ETFs. Also in this episode:
Interest rates are rising, bond prices are falling, and the Fed is staying put — as is Jerome Powell.
Approximately a third of car buyers who traded in a vehicle had negative equity, and auto loan default rates are at their highest level since 2010.
Almost half of retirees stop working sooner than expected, mostly not by choice, so factor a shorter career into your retirement calculations.
We’re already a third through 2026, so revisit those New Year’s resolutions from January by getting caught up with our “Year Well Planned” challenge.
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This podcast was recorded on May 2, 2026.
Robert Brokamp: How to analyze funds, and you may retire sooner than planned. That and more on this Saturday’s Personal Finance edition of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast. I'm Robert Brokamp, and it's the first Saturday of the month, which means it's the next installment of our 2026 financial planning challenge. This month, Amanda Kish joins me to discuss the factors to consider when evaluating mutual funds and ETFs.
First up, some items from the news, you know, oil is once again on the rise, but the stock market doesn’t seem to care. As of this taping on Thursday morning, the S&P 500 is up more than 12% for the month of April. But the bond market is showing signs of anxiety. The rate on the 10-year treasury got over 4.4% again this week, and the rate on the 30-year treasury is just a hair below 5%. Except for a brief spike in 2023, the rate on the 30-year treasury is getting to a level not seen since the early 2010s. As rates go up, bond prices fall, which is why the bond market is about flat for the year on a total return basis, despite yielding above 4%.
The bond market shouldn't expect any near-term help from the Federal Reserve. The Fed concluded its latest meeting this week, leaving rates unchanged, and the futures market predicts that that will remain the case for the rest of the year, and that if there are any movements in rates, it's just about as likely to be a hike as a cut. Given rising inflation. I should point out that this was likely the last meeting with Jerome Powell as chair, but he's not leaving. He has the option to remain on the board as governor. Traditionally, chairs resign after their terms, but they don't have to. At the post-meeting press conference, Powell said he's going to remain until an investigation into the costs of renovating the Federal Reserve's headquarters is "Well and truly over with transparency and finality." The Fed's HQ is known as the Eccles Building, named after Marriner Eccles, who was the last chair to remain on the board of governors after his term as chair was over, doing it way back in 1948.
Higher interest rates means more expensive loans, which brings us to our second item from the news. According to a recent article from the Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Felton, about 30% of car buyers who traded in a vehicle in the first quarter had negative equity, owing an average of roughly $7,200 more than their car was worth, a 42% increase over five years. To keep monthly payments manageable, borrowers are stretching loan terms to an average of 70 months, with some loans now exceeding eight years. Negative equity buyers financed an average of nearly $56,000 for a new car in Q1 of 2026, about $12,000 more than the typical buyer, pushing their average monthly payment to a record $932. The 2024 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study found that borrowers who rolled negative equity into a new loan were more than twice as likely to have their car repossessed within two years. We're starting to see those risks materialize. Auto loan default rates in March hit their highest level since 2010.
Now for the number of the week, which is 46%, that's the percentage of people who retired in 2025 earlier than they expected, according to the recently published Retirement Confidence survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. This is consistent with plenty of other research, which it finds that many if not most people retire sooner than they had planned, with the gap being about three years. The leading reasons are health challenges, caregiving responsibilities, and layoffs. When you analyze your retirement plan by using maybe an online calculator or working with a financial planner, knock a few years off your projected retirement date and then adjust your savings rate accordingly. That will likely mean that you need to contribute more to your 401(k) and IRA, but it will also increase the chances that you'll be prepared if you can't work as long as you thought you would, and also allow you to retire sooner if you want. Next up, what to look for in a fund when Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing continues.
Welcome to month five of our 2026 financial planning challenge, which we're calling a year well-planned. So far this year, we've talked about how to monitor your budget and your net worth, how to determine your overall asset allocation, how to choose the types of investments for your portfolio, and in which accounts to hold them. This month is somewhat of an extension of last month's installment because we're going to talk about how to evaluate funds, because chances are you own some. There are more than now 10,000 open-end mutual funds that exchange traded funds, otherwise known as ETFs. According to the Investment Company Institute, more than 120 million individuals in the U.S. own some type of fund. After all, you may not have a choice. The most common way that Americans save for retirement is through an employer plan like a 401(k), and in most of those plans, the only investment choices you have are a menu of mutual funds. Here to talk about how to evaluate the funds you own or are considering is Certified Financial Planner® and Chartered Financial Analyst Amanda Kish. Amanda, welcome back to the show.
Amanda Kish: Thank you so very much. I'm glad to be back.
Robert Brokamp: When you think about the number of funds out there, it's bewildering. In fact, in some cases, it’s even more than the number of stocks you have to own.
Amanda Kish: That's exactly right. You mentioned that number of 10,000 mutual funds, and even just ETFs, exchange traded funds, according to Morningstar data. As of last year, we officially passed the point that there are now more ETFs currently being traded than individual listed stocks. We have 4,300-4,400 ETFs to around 4,200 stocks. It's a wide universe, and investors definitely need some tools to help them sort through that.
Robert Brokamp: We're going to talk about what we think are the most important criteria when evaluating a fund. We're going to start actually with costs.
Amanda Kish: Expenses are definitely one of the most important variables to consider. If you think about it, fees are the only part of fund investing where the outcome is certain. Performance might surprise you to the upside or the downside, and markets certainly are going to fluctuate from year to year. But those fees, those expenses come out every single year, rain or shine. The number to examine here is the expense ratio, and this is expressed as an annual percentage of your assets. An expense ratio that is 0.03% or three basis points would cost you $3 a year for every $10,000 that you have invested, and a 1% expense ratio would cost you $100 on that same amount, which doesn't seem like a lot, but when you compound this over long periods of time, 10, 20, 30 years, that gap often translates to tens of thousands of dollars in fees. One important caveat here is when you're comparing these fees, you want to compare fees within asset classes, not across them. For example, a 0.5% expense ratio on something like a small-cap emerging market fund, that's fairly competitive. But that same 0.5% expense ratio on an S&P 500 index is pretty crazy because you can get identical exposure for about three basis points compared to 50.
As a general rule, the more complex or specialized the asset class, then the higher the expense ratio because it typically costs more to run something like an emerging markets fund or small-cap active strategy than just a plain old S&P 500 index fund. That's going to be reflected in what you pay. Morningstar is a great source of fund data, and they benchmark any fund’s expense ratio against its category average, which is exactly what you want to compare for the apples-to-apples comparison. Then again, just keep in mind that most ETFs, which are, for the most part, generally passive investments, and they're simply tracking a market index, they should have a lower price point than a similar actively managed fund in that same asset class because you're not paying for that manager stock picking expertise.
Robert Brokamp: The evidence is very clear that fees affect performance. You mentioned Morningstar, and Morningstar has some studies on this, as have other folks. The bottom line is that as a group, the cheapest funds outperform the average cost funds, and the average cost funds outperform the high-cost funds over the long term. It's one of those things that the history just shows it's the place to start. Now, the funds do have to charge fees. They don't work for free, and they have to do that to buy and sell the investments, send you the statements, but also that money is going to go towards the people who manage the funds, which brings us to the next factor that you think people should pay attention to.
Amanda Kish: Yes, and that factor is manager tenure. This is something that's important, especially if you're investing in actively managed funds. If you're paying a premium for that active management, at least in theory, you're paying for a specific person or a specific team's skill and judgment. Then that first question is, is that person still there? Manager tenure is publicly available from a couple of different sources in Morningstar, Funds Prospectus, fund company’s website. But it's important because if a fund, say, had a great 10-year track record, but the manager who built that record left three years ago, that track record really tells you nothing about what you're going to get going forward. I always recommend checking how long has that current manager been in charge. Does the fund strategy depend heavily on one person, or is it more team-based with a documented succession plan? Ideally, you're going to want to see a manager or a team that's been in place over a full market cycle. You want to see results from that manager, that team in both challenging and positive market environment.
Then, along those lines, I'd add that even when the same manager is still in place, take a look at whether the fund has grown dramatically in assets under management. For example, a manager who, let's say, ran a more nimble $500 million small cap fund and may have done that very well may struggle to replicate that edge when the fund has grown, if they're now at $5 billion in assets, $10 billion assets, because at that size, they simply can't move in out of small cap positions without moving the market. But for index funds, manager tenure matters far less. Basically, the index is the manager in this sense. That is one more thing that makes passive investing so attractive because you don't have to worry about manager tenure in the same way.
Robert Brokamp: I'll just double down what you said about when it comes to who's managing the fund, is it a team approach? Because some funds really depend on maybe one or two people. They're the star managers. You just wonder if they leave, are they taking the performance with them? As opposed to a fund family that really focuses on a committee approach. I guess the best example for RFA that is Dodge and Cox, which is one of the oldest mutual fund families. They really do take a committee approach to managing the funds so that if someone moves off, you can feel pretty confident that the team that remains is still going to be able to follow the same processes that has been followed for many years.
Then the other point I'll make is about index funds. As you said, index funds are so much more of a set-it-and-forget-it type of investment, not completely. You still want to make sure that you have an index fund that really is tracking the index. Of course, every year or so, you should be evaluating whether you should be rebalancing, so maybe you should sell a little bit of that index fund or buy a little bit more. But it is once you've decided on the index fund that's right for you, it takes much less time, whereas with the actively managed fund, you have to make sure that that person is earning those extra fees because, frankly, it's challenging to beat a relevant index fund, so you have to stay on top of that and make sure that, you know what? I'm paying more, but I am getting the performance, or I'm not getting that performance, and it's time to move on. We looked at fees and people in charge. What's next, Amanda?
Amanda Kish: Next, we want to examine the question of what do I actually own or is the fund doing what it says it's going to do? Fund names can be misleading. A fund called balance growth might be 80% stocks, or it might be 50% stocks, and you don't know until you look. A technology fund, for example, might have 40% of its assets in just a few companies or a diversified large-cap blend fund might have massive sector concentration in financials, for example. The name is really marketing. It's the holdings that are reality. A couple of things that you want to check here: first, top holdings and any concentrations in those holdings. What are the 10 largest positions in the fund, and what percentage of the fund do they represent? If you have a case where the top 10 holdings are something like 70% of the fund, you're a lot more concentrated than you might otherwise think. This matters especially if you hold multiple funds because you could be doubling up on a lot of those same names without even realizing it.
Then you also want to check the sector allocation. Every fund, their fact sheet or their Morningstar page is going to show you the sector weights. Compare those to the benchmark because you may have a blend fund that's 35% in technology when the benchmark is 28%. That means it has a meaningful tech tilt, which might be intentional and fine. If you're paying for that active management, may be even desirable, but you should at the very least know that it's there and that you're differing from the market in that important way. Then lastly, take a look at the style. Morningstar is a very famous nine-box grid that tells you where a fund sits both on the market cap spectrum. Is it large cap, mid cap, small cap? Then also the style spectrum, is it a value fund, blend fund, or growth fund? Is it actually doing what the label says? Sometimes funds drift from their stated mandate over time. For example, if a small-cap fund has gradually accumulated mid-cap names over time, something that we call style drift, and it's something to watch for. The practical question to ask is, if I own this fund alongside my other holdings, am I actually diversified, or am I just buying the same companies multiple times in different wrappers? You can't actually know what your portfolio is doing unless you know what your funds are doing, and that really starts by looking under the hood at each of those funds.
Robert Brokamp: To add a couple of points on this. I think it's good to look at the fund’s objective because it will lay out the parameters that a fund manager must stick with. If it's an index fund, it'll tell you which index it's following. But with actively managed funds, sometimes a manager has the ability to go beyond what you would think would be the stated objective. It may say it's a U.S. stock fund, but it may be able to invest up to 20% in international stocks, for example, or if it's more like this balanced or all asset type of fund, it might give a range, saying the fund could invest up to 90% in stocks or as little as 50% in stock. It's just good to understand that.
When you look at that style box on Morningstar and some of the other information, it does provide some historical information. You'll see how much the fund is maybe jumping around a little bit in terms of allocations at its style drift. Then the other thing I want to add is, before you add a fund to your portfolio, really do look at the holdings and the sector breakdown because as you said, Amanda, a lot of these funds overlap. If you look at a fund and you're like, I own most of these stocks already, or I already have enough exposure to these sectors, then it's probably not worth adding that fund to your portfolio because you're not getting any added diversification. Now let's move on to the numbers that I suspect most people actually start with which is performance.
Amanda Kish: That's exactly right. For most folks, this is the starting point, but I think this should be a factor that's examined only after you look at those other aspects of determining whether a fund is suitable. Now we're looking at performance, and that's very important to do, but I do want to reframe a little bit how we look at it. One of the biggest mistakes people make is comparing a fund's return to the wrong benchmark. If you own, for example, an international small-cap value fund, and you're comparing it to the S&P 500, that comparison is pretty much meaningless. You really need to compare it to funds in the same category, investing in the same type of assets. And Morningstar's category system is great for this. It puts funds in peer groups and tells you what percentile the fund ranks in its category over various time frames.
The second mistake related to performance is chasing recent performance. Research is pretty unambiguous. That past performance, especially short-term performance, is a pretty weak predictor of future results. In fact, funds that are top-quartile performers over, let's say, three years frequently end up reverting back to the middle and to that mediocrity over the next three-year period. What you want to see is that consistency across market cycles in both good and bad environments and not necessarily hanging everything on a single banner year. The time frame that you should look at for actively managed funds, I would want to see a full market cycle, if possible. Again, both good and bad market environments, but ideally somewhere around 7-10 years. If you're looking at Morningstar returns, you're going to be focusing more on the five-year return number or that 10-year return number. Three years is typically too short to get a good sense. Again if you want to see those returns benchmarked against the category, not the S&P 500.
For index funds, the performance evaluation factor is a little bit simpler. You can look at tracking error here. That measures how closely the fund actually replicates its index. A good index fund should track its index almost perfectly, and that tracking error will tell you if there's any deviation, and that's something that Morningstar reports.
Robert Brokamp: I also think it's important to look at how a fund performed in a really good year and a really bad year. More recently, you would say, maybe, 2022 would be the bad year for both stocks and bonds, one of the worst years for bonds ever to be quite honest. That gives you an idea of in a bad year, this is the downside I could expect. Then in a good year, and that could be 2023 was really good for stocks. Mediocre for bonds, but still gave you a good idea. A couple of years later, probably were better for bonds. But whenever you're looking at a fund, it just gives you an idea, this is what I can expect. I think it's also important when you're considering asset classes that you are unfamiliar with. Every once in a while, we'll get questions like, I'm thinking of adding a high-yield bond fund to my portfolio or a preferred stock fund. If you've never invested in those types of asset classes, again, I think it's good to look at the good years and the bad years just to give you proper expectations of what you might experience. Performance is what you get, but that may not be what you keep because Uncle Sam may want his share, especially if this is an account that is not a 401(k) or an IRA. Amanda, tell us about fund investing and taxes.
Amanda Kish: Yes, so as you mentioned this point applies only to taxable accounts. If we're talking about 401(k) or an IRA, you can largely tune this out. But in a taxable brokerage account, this is a big deal. Every time a fund sells a holding at a gain, it distributes those capital gains to shareholders, and you're going to owe taxes on them, even if you didn't sell a single share and you never saw that cash. High turnover funds or funds that have experienced large redemptions, which would then force them to sell holdings, can generate significant taxable distributions. There's two ways that you can assess that tax efficiency. The first signal is portfolio turnover. This is the percentage of the funds holdings that are replaced each year. A turnover rate of say, 10%-20% is fairly low. On the other end, 100% means the fund is essentially replacing its entire portfolio every year. That higher turnover oftentimes means higher trading cost embedded in the fund. Again that's separate from the expense ratio. It also means the fund is likely generating more taxable events.
The second thing to check is Morningstar's tax cost ratio, and this is going to be the more precise tool. What this measure does is estimates how much of a fund's return was lost to taxes each year. A tax cost ratio of 1.5% means that if the fund returned 8% pretax, investors in a taxable account might have netted closer to 6.5% after taxes, and those aren't trivial numbers. For taxable accounts, also index funds, ETFs tend to be more tax-efficient than actively managed funds because of lower turnover. Also important to note that ETFs have a structural advantage called in-kind creation or redemption that allows them to avoid realizing capital gains internally. That's an important note that if you are building a taxable account, this is a structural advantage that is a meaningful reason to lean toward ETFs when building that portfolio.
Robert Brokamp: Just point out that you find out that tax cost ratio on the Price tab. When you go to morningstar.com, you enter the ticker and then click on the Price tab, and that's where you'll find that tax cost ratio, which is very important for any fund you own or considering for a taxable brokerage account. Amanda, what are your final thoughts on how Fools should pick their funds?
Amanda Kish: I'll leave listeners with one item on their fund to-do list. Start with what you already own. If you have just a few minutes, pull up your 401(k) or your brokerage account, find each fund, and look it up on Morningstar. It's free to use for basic data. Just check three things. Check the expense ratio, the category ranking for five and 10-year performance, and the top 10 holdings. That maybe 15-minute exercise is going to tell you a lot. If you only remember one thing from today, remember that low fees are the one guaranteed advantage you can give yourself. Everything else involves some uncertainty, but fees don't.
Robert Brokamp: I'll just add that if you follow Amanda's advice and evaluate the funds in your 401(k), and you find there's some lousy funds relative to others in their category, let your HR department or whoever's in charge of your 401(k) know. Both Amanda and I are on the 401(k) committee here at The Motley Fool, and we regularly meet to evaluate the funds in our plan and consider maybe there's some funds or asset classes that should be added. We just met yesterday, talking about this. Really, you should not be stuck with mediocre or worse funds, or maybe lack sufficient choices within your plan. Do some research and politely advocate for better investments and perhaps even ask for a brokerage account within your plan. Well, Amanda, this has been educational as always. Thanks for joining us.
Robert Brokamp: It's time to get it done, Fools, and as April ends and May begins, we're now already a third through 2026. This week, I encourage you to revisit those financial New Year's resolutions you made way back in January, because if surveys are to be believed, you may have already abandoned some or most of them by now. Getting caught up with our year well planned is a great way to get back on track. Go back and listen to the first Saturday episodes of every month and get some ideas for tracking your spending, net worth, and portfolio. If you find any gaps in your portfolio, buying a low-cost fund or ETF is a quick and easy way to get diversified exposure to just about any kind of asset class. That, my friends, is the show. Thank you so much for spending part of your weekend with us and thanks to Bart Shannon, the engineer for this episode.
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How to Analyze Mutual Funds and ETFs was originally published by The Motley Fool