In last month’s issue, I made mention of the new features and enhancements we were adding to AAII.com. Since they were launched shortly after the start of the year, many AAII members have started taking advantage of them. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to visit AAII.com today.

Among the features already proving to be popular is My Portfolio. This is a brand new portfolio tracking tool we built from scratch using our perspective as individual investors. It provides price and return information on stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds. If you bought an investment on more than one occasion, you can enter each lot separately. Fundamental indicators about your stocks—including valuation and yield—are provided.

We’ve added brand new mutual fund tools. They include Mutual Funds First Cuts, the best and worst funds by category and a helpful fund comparison tool. The comparison tool can help you decide between two or more mutual funds. My colleague Wayne Thorp goes into more detail about our new mutual fund tools here.

If your interest also extends to ETFs, we’ve added specific tools for them too.

As far as stocks are concerned, there’s quite a lot on AAII.com. Our 60 guru and factor screens, a popular feature of AAII membership, are now updated on approximately the first of every month, earlier than before. Typing a ticker symbol into the search bar located at the top of most pages calls up our Stock Evaluator. This tool gives you a summary of the company’s financials, along with key growth, valuation and earnings estimates data as well as the latest price quote. Want to see the stock’s chart? Just click on the Charts tab in the evaluator.

We’ve also revamped our Stocks section on AAII.com. I point this out because it’s an easy way to keep track of the Model Shadow Stock Portfolio. Just click on Stocks from the horizontal menu bar near the top of any page on AAII.com and scroll down. You’ll see information about the portfolio, including the cheapest stocks currently meeting our buy criteria for the portfolio.

Even our website’s search bar has been made more powerful. You can call up the evaluator pages on the mutual fund or ETF you’re interested in (in addition to the aforementioned Stock Evaluator pages). The search bar is also helpful for finding information on specific topics such as valuation, taxes or withdrawal rates.

One other change we made was to greatly expand the universe of mutual funds we cover. You can now find information on more than 25,000 mutual funds, including those offered through 401(k)s and other similar retirement plans as well as those sold through advisers on AAII.com. The list of fund families our database covers is also greatly expanded from past years.

With all of these changes, we decided to step back and look at our annual mutual fund guide. Its format has not been revised in 10 years. Historically, our primary means of providing comprehensive mutual fund data to all AAII members was through this annual guide. Now, the data is updated every month on our website. Still, we know the guide is a popular feature of AAII membership, so we wanted to maintain it.

Our 39th Individual Investor’s Guide to the Top Mutual Funds starts here. Like past editions, it lists the most widely held and best- and worst-performing mutual funds. You can also find information about a large number of no-load stock (both domestic and international), bond (corporate, government and muni), balanced and target-date funds. New in this issue is a companion piece that discusses in detail how to go about choosing a mutual fund.

Also new this year are our mutual fund grades. These grades quickly tell you how a fund’s performance and risk compare to other funds. The grades work just as they did in school: A’s are good while F’s are bad.

Don’t see a fund you own or are interested in in the print edition of the magazine? Come to AAII.com, where the data is available at the dedicated Mutual Fund Guide. Even better, use the My Portfolio tool to track any fund of interest.

In conjunction with the changes, we’ll be adding new features for fund investors in the AAII Journal. Our second Mutual Funds First Cut appears here in this month’s issue. Starting in May, we’ll be adding our Quarterly Mutual Fund Report and a brand new Quarterly ETF Report to the AAII Journal.

I hope you find these changes to be useful.

Wishing you prosperity,