• AAII key webpages now have personalized dashboards
• Revamped fund guides and screeners are faster and offer a better user experience
• AAII’s essential Retirement Investing service was launched last fall

Over the past year, the AAII staff has been diligently working to improve and expand the tools and information we provide, with many changes drawing directly from member feedback. The annual AAII Member News column gives us a chance to report on the latest enhancements and additions to member benefits and update members on our initiatives and plans.

We encourage all members to explore these new features and updates. If you have any questions, need further assistance or are considering an upgrade to your membership, please do not hesitate to reach out to members@aaii.com. Your engagement and feedback are crucial, as they help us tailor our services to better meet your needs.

Enhancing the AAII Website Display and Navigation

Whether you visit AAII.com frequently or only occasionally, you may have noticed that our home page underwent a significant overhaul last year. To make the site more digestible, user-friendly and interactive, we enhanced this most crucial part of our website. We not only updated the appearance of the home page but also transformed it into a custom dashboard. Here, you can easily monitor market activity throughout the day, gauge investor sentiment, access the latest content and view trending stock tickers and daily movers.

We designed our home page to reflect what members want to see and use. You can smoothly navigate to a model portfolio, discover community events and webinars or find new stock screening strategies and opportunities. The improvements make the home page more intuitive, allowing you to spend less time searching and more time identifying the right investments for your portfolio.

A convenient My Tools menu has been placed at the top right in the banner head. This gives you quick access to the AAII tools available to you. All members have access to My Portfolio for tracking securities, My Stock Screens for following your favorite stock idea generators and My Library for saving AAII articles of interest. If your interests prompted you to subscribe to any of our premium products, they are listed here as well for easy access.

Our premium A+ Investor page also underwent a redesign over the past year. A+ Investor houses numerous tools that were sometimes difficult to access. The new section page simplifies the process of tracking investments and discovering new opportunities for subscribers. One major improvement was adding tabs that make it easy to find content tailored to your interest, whether it is stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or mutual funds.

Personalization features were added so that when you choose a default portfolio from My Portfolio, you’ll see at a glance its current A+ Grades and diversification status. Your top five holdings and portfolio insights are also prominently displayed, and on the right-hand side you can view daily price changes as well as stock upgrades and downgrades for securities you track.

With the updated A+ Investor page, you don’t need to navigate from page to page; every tool and resource is at your fingertips, saving you valuable time. If you’re an A+ Investor subscriber and haven’t fully explored its facelift yet, check it out today at www.aaii.com/plus. 

Restarting the AAII Educated Investor Weekly Email

Back by popular demand is one of our members’ favorite benefits: the AAII Educated Investor email. This free weekly email series supplements your AAII membership by highlighting relevant content you may have overlooked on our website or in the monthly AAII Journal. It also keeps you informed about notable AAII events and community discussions that may interest you. We know life can get busy, so we offer this consolidated digest that can broaden your investment know-how in a matter of minutes.

If you aren’t receiving this email on Wednesdays, please go to www.aaii.com/email and select AAII Educated Investor from the AAII Membership Emails list. While you are there, make sure you are signed up for our other members-only emails that interest you.

Revamping the Fund Guides and Screeners

Our mutual fund and ETF guides have long kept AAII members up to date on the funds that interest them. To relieve the restrictions of print, expanded data was made available in a more flexible online tool. A few years ago, we were able to add monthly data updates to increase the usefulness of the digital guides. More recently, we developed premium fund and ETF screeners that allowed those looking for more control to filter the universe and choose criteria to build and save fund screens.

In the latest development, we’ve rethought the fund screening platform and the result is a faster and more user-friendly tool. Results are displayed in a tabular format, making it easier to focus on performance, portfolio composition, risk measures and fee data. This presentation has been incorporated into the fund and ETF guides that all members have access to.

A+ Investor subscribers can take advantage of 35 variables to filter more than 23,000 mutual funds and 40 variables to explore over 3,400 ETFs. The new interface allows you to evaluate and compare funds as well as search for funds by ticker.

Go to www.aaii.com/guides to explore the new interface and data display on our mutual fund and ETF guides. If you’re an A+ Investor subscriber, go to www.aaii.com/screens/funds or www.aaii.com/screens/etfs to try out the new and improved fund screeners. 

Stepping Up Our Retirement Education and Resources

Over the last several years, we have received countless requests for more content and resources centered around retirement planning and investing. Initially, we thought adding additional content to the AAII Journal would sufficiently meet this need. However, we realized that a dedicated service was necessary to adequately cover the breadth of issues associated with each unique life phase: saving for retirement, transitioning into retirement and living in retirement.

After months on the drawing board and in the workshop, AAII Retirement Investing was launched in fall 2023 as our newest premium product. Helmed by AAII investment editor Cynthia McLaughlin, it provides a one-stop shop for holistic retirement content, regardless of your current life phase or level of investing knowledge.

In the short span of its existence, the monthly newsletter has tackled the themes of saving strategies, estate planning, year-end tax and portfolio moves, asset allocation, monitoring and managing your portfolio throughout the year, as well as glide path strategies and target-date funds. It has also deftly tackled sensitive topics such as the saving and investing challenges women face along with behavioral finance and cognitive decline/mental health issues. In addition to the monthly newsletter, subscribers receive a weekly email with more retirement insights and news items. The monthly AAII Retirement Pulse survey invites readers to share their experiences and gives us feedback on retirement concerns they want covered.

Enhancements to the service are already in the planning stage as we work to build out complementary features. For more information on AAII Retirement Investing, please go to https://retirement.aaii.com.

AAII Financial Summary

Annually, AAII publishes its year-end balance sheet for members and life members interested in the finances of the association. Prior years’ balance sheets can be found online in the Member News sections of past AAII Journals.

Academic Awards: Fostering Investment Education and Research

Five papers won awards for investment research from AAII in the past year. The awards are presented as part of AAII’s ongoing effort to encourage education and research in the area of investments and are given for papers that provide insight into investing.

The awards are made in conjunction with the meetings of major finance associations around the country. The best academic papers presented at these meetings are selected by a committee of investment research experts.

AAII awards the writers of winning papers. Papers are selected based on the quality and thoroughness of research and on the contribution to shaping effective investment decisions.

Since the program began in 1983, more than 200 awards have been presented. Recent award-winning papers and recipients include:

“Global Footprint of U.S. Fiscal Policy,” by Sun Yong Kim of Northwestern University, awarded by the Financial Management Association.

“The Cross-section of Subjective Expectations: Understanding Prices and Anomalies,” by Ricardo De la O of University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, Xiao Han of City University London Bayes Business School and Sean Myers of the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, awarded by the Eastern Finance Association.

“Optimism Shifting,” by Stefano Cassela of Tilburg University School of Economics and Management, Chukwuma Dim of George Washington University and Tural Karlimi of Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, awarded by the Midwest Finance Association.

“Who Benefits from Analyst ‘Top Picks’?,” by Justin Birru of The Ohio State University, Sinan Gokkaya of Ohio University, Xi Liu of Miami University of Ohio Farmer School of Business Administration and René M. Stulz of The Ohio State University, NBER and ECGI, awarded by the Southern Finance Association.

“Mutual Fund Shorts and the Benefits of Acquiring Information,” by Boone Bowles of Texas A&M University Mays Business School and Adam V. Reed of University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, awarded by the Southwestern Finance Association.

These papers are technical; however, the AAII Journal does publish the findings of papers that are of particular interest to individual investors. 

AAII Privacy Policy

Our goal at AAII is to offer you the best investor education in a simple and secure manner via internet and print methods. As a publisher, we gather user and member information in order to provide an investor-friendly service.

We request your email address as part of the registration process for AAII.com. We use this information to contact our members and guest users regarding updates to the website and to personalize the service.

AAII tracks website activity and usage through log analysis to produce a better web product for our members. Some measurements include click activity and time in site.

AAII.com uses cookies to remember login settings and facilitate navigation through the site. AAII may also use third-party advertising networks that employ cookie technology. We do not extract personal information through these cookies. They are used to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing programs.

AAII maintains a subscriber list. As a publisher/membership organization, we reserve the right to contact our users for our legitimate business needs, such as email and paper mailings regarding AAII products and services, or fulfilling a transaction initiated by the user. However, we do on occasion make portions of this list available to carefully screened companies that offer personal finance products and services that we believe may be of interest to those affiliated with AAII. To the extent we process your personal data for other purposes, we ask for your consent in advance or require that our partners obtain such consent. If you do not want to receive these offers, please let us know by contacting AAII Member Services at members@aaii.com.

AAII’s Text Messaging Privacy Policy uses your phone number to deliver a personalized experience via our messaging service, managed by HubSpot. We adhere to strict data protection standards, sharing information only under necessary conditions and ensuring that robust security measures are in place. For personalized text messages and important updates, your contact details facilitate these communications. You can opt out of our messaging at any time by responding with keywords like STOP or UNSUBSCRIBE, maintaining your preference for privacy and control over your personal information.

You have control over your personal information and how it is collected, used and shared. To manage your account and the content contained in it, as well as edit some of your personal data and manage your privacy preferences, go to your My Account page. If you do not want to receive marketing materials from us, you can opt out at any time by simply clicking the unsubscribe link in any email or updating your preferences in the email management section of your user account.

This privacy policy is subject to change. For the most current version, visit www.aaii.com/privacy.