Screening Funds using the Family Tab Sieve Mutual Fund Charting, Ranking, and Analysis
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Screening with the Family Tab Sievefamedit.gif (13304 bytes)

Updated 01/17/12

What's a family?

Families are saved-on-disk collections of issues according to a variety of criteria. There are FastTrack predefined families in many categories and a special category  of personal families that you create yourself using tools on FastTrack's Family Tab.
Creating a family

The following is an example of screening to create a family of issues that meets your specific criteria. It describes the use of the Family Tab Sieve

Most mutual fund advisors suggest holding a diversified portfolio of funds. Some investors take this to mean constantly holding a several mutual funds. But what diversification really means is to be holding funds that move in different directions.

As a training exercise, lets make a diversified family that meets the following criteria.

  1. Limit the selection to only US funds.
  2. Consider only funds with long-time, experienced managers.
  3. Include only equity funds.
  4. Pick the maverick managers whose strategies don’t match the pattern of broad market indices.

Start by clicking on the Family Tab.

  1. Clear the list in the lower right portion of the screen by right-clicking and selecting "Clear List". We will build our new screened family in this list.
  2. Add the M-Senior and M-Long families to the list by highlighting those families in the family tree on the left side of the screen.. Do one at a time. Highlight, then click the Sieve's [ + ] button. This creates a list of funds whose managers have longer than average experience at the helm of a successful mutual fund.
  3. Remove the ALL-INT family. First highlight ALL-INT in the tree, then click on the   [ - ] button  This gets rid of all international funds.
  4. Remove the ALL-INC family. Using the  [ - ] Button. This gets rid of all the income oriented funds as we want to hold more aggressively managed funds.
  5. Make a subset of funds that are in the list and that are in the COR-LOW family using the [And]  button. These for funds that are not highly correlated to market indexes. That is, activedly managed funds.
  6. Save the Family. Use the name DIVERSE. Right-click the Issue List , then choose Save as Family.
  7. Click the Chart Tab to return to the charts. They have not changed despite your activity in the Family Tab.
  8. Right-click the Issue List. Choose "Load Family".Expand the Personal Families Category, then double-click the DIVERSE family.

This will leave you with a list of experienced-manager funds that DO NOT have a high degree of correlation to market indices. These funds have historically been managed in a way that makes them alternatives to simply holding an S&P-500 index fund AND they still employ the long-term managers who gave their funds a unique track record.