What resources can I use to try and find out the name of the manager for a given fund?
"Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=VFINX+Profile Under ""Management Information""" The fund prospectus is a good place to start.
What is the best option to start with? and  I am not sure about my goals right now but I do want to have a major retirement account without changing it for a long time That is a loaded question. Your goals should be set up first, else what is stopping you from playing the mega millions lottery to earn the retirement amount instantly. If you have the time and resources, you should try doing it yourself. It helps you learn and at a latter stage if you don't have the time to manage it yourself, you can find an adviser who does it for you. To find a good adviser or find a fund who/which can help you achieve your monetary goals you will need to understand the details, how it works and other stuff, behind it.  When you are thrown terms at your face by somebody, you should be able to join the dots and get a picture for yourself. Many a rich men have lost their money to unscrupulous people i.e. Bernie Madoff. So knowing helps a lot and then you can ask questions or find for yourself to calm yourself i.e. ditch the fund or adviser, when you see red flags. It also makes you not to be too greedy, when somebody paints you a picture of great returns, because then your well oiled mind would start questioning the rationale behind such investments. Have a look at Warren Buffet. He is an investor and you can follow how he does his investing. It is simple but very difficult to follow. Investing through my bank I would prefer to stay away from them, because their main service is banking and not allowing people to trade. I would first compare the services provided by a bank to TD Ameritrade, or any firm providing trading services. The thing is, as you mentioned in the question, you have to go through a specific process of calling him to change your portfolio, which shouldn't be a condition. What might happen is, if he is getting some benefits out of the arrangement(get it clarified in the first place if you intend to go through them), from the side of the fund, he might try to dissuade you from doing so to protect his stream of income. And what if he is on a holiday or you cannot get hold of him. Secondly from your question, it seems you aren't that investing literate. So it is very easy to get you confused by jargon and making you do what he gets the maximum benefit out of it, rather than which benefits you more.  I ain't saying he is doing so but that could be a possibility too, so you have consider that angle too. The pro is that setting up an account through them might be much easier than directly going to a provider. But the best point doing it yourself is, you will learn and there is nothing which tops that. You don't want somebody else managing your money, however knowledgeable they maybe i.e. Anthony Bolton. "The question is asking for a European equivalent of the so-called ""Couch Potato"" portfolio. ""Couch Potato"" portfolio is defined by the two URLs provided in question as, Criteria for fund composition Fixed-income: Regardless of country or supra-national market, the fixed-income fund should have holdings throughout the entire length of the yield curve (most available maturities), as well as being a mix of government, municipal (general obligation), corporate and high-yield bonds.  Equity: The common equity position should be in one equity market index fund. It shouldn't be a DAX-30 or CAC-40 or DJIA type fund. Instead, you want a combination of growth and value companies. The fund should have as many holdings as possible, while avoiding too much expense due to transaction costs. You can determine how much is too much by comparing candidate funds with those that are only investing in highly liquid, large company stocks. Why it is easier for U.S. and Canadian couch potatoes It will be easier to find two good funds, at lower cost, if one is investing in a country with sizable markets and its own currency. That's why the Couch Potato strategy lends itself most naturally to the U.S.A, Canada, Japan and probably Australia, Brazil, South Korea and possibly Mexico too. In Europe, pre-EU, any of Germany, France, Spain, Italy or the Scandinavian countries would probably have worked well. The only concern would be (possibly) higher equity transactions costs and certainly larger fixed-income buy-sell spreads, due to smaller and less liquid markets other than Germany. These costs would be experienced by the portfolio manager, and passed on to you, as the investor. For the EU couch potato Remember the criteria, especially part 2, and the intent as described by the Couch Potato name, implying extremely passive investing. You want to choose two funds offered by very stable, reputable fund management companies. You will be re-balancing every six months or a year, only. That is four transactions per year, maximum. You don't need a lot of interaction with anyone, but you DO need to have the means to quickly exit both sides of the trade, should you decide, for any reason, that you need the money or that the strategy isn't right for you.  I would not choose an ETF from iShares just because it is easy to do online transactions. For many investors, that is important! Here, you don't need that convenience. Instead, you need stability and an index fund with a good reputation. You should try to choose an EU based fund manager, or one in your home country, as you'll be more likely to know who is good and who isn't. Don't use Vanguard's FTSE ETF or the equivalent, as there will probably be currency and foreign tax concerns, and possibly forex risk. The couch potato strategy requires an emphasis on low fees with high quality funds and brokers (if not buying directly from the fund). As for type of fund, it would be best to choose a fund that is invested in mostly or only EU or EEU (European Economic Union) stocks, and the same for bonds. That will help minimize your transaction costs and tax liability, while allowing for the sort of broad diversity that helps buy and hold index fund investors." You do not need to have 'high net value', and yes, you can invest in it. Typically, fund companies require a minimum investment, that could be 100, it could be a 1000. 5000 should be enough for 99.9 % of all funds for an initial investment. What you need is an investment company that manages the account for you. I cannot name those for your country, but they should be easy to find (companies like IMG, and Fidelity might serve your country). You then open an account with the company of your choice, transfer the money, and tell them which fund it shall go in; all this is possible online. You can also go to see an agent in person, and he will fill the forms for you, and handle all the action, but he might take a fee for it. According to this site:   If you think the plan trustees or others responsible for investing your pension money have been violating the rules, you should call or write the nearest field office of the U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA (formerly PWBA)). Looking at EBSA's FAQ for abandoned plans finds:   EBSA has developed an Abandoned Plan searchable database to help participants and beneficiaries find out if a particular plan is in the process of being, or has been, terminated. The site is searchable by plan name or employer name and will provide the name and contact information for the QTA, if one exists.  If you do not have access to a computer to conduct the search, you may contact one of EBSA’s Benefits Advisors to assist you by calling toll-free, 1.866.444.EBSA (3272). So I would try searching the database for your plan.  If that doesn't help, you can call EBSA and ask for more specific assistance.  Or use the contact us page to find an alternative contact method. "The mutual fund is legally its own company that you're investing in, with its own expenses. Mutual fund expense ratios are a calculated value, not a promise that you'll pay a certain percentage on a particular day. That is to say, at the end of their fiscal year, a fund will total up how much it spent on administration and divide it by the total assets under management to calculate what the expense ratio is for that year, and publish it in the annual report. But you can't just ""pay the fee"" for any given year. In a ""regular"" account, you certainly could look at what expenses were paid for each fund by multiplying the expense ratio by your investment, and use it in some way to figure out how much additional you want to contribute to ""make it whole"" again. But it makes about as much sense as trying to pay the commission for buying a single stock out of one checking account while paying for the share price out of another. It may help you in some sort of mental accounting of expenses, but since it's all your money, and the expenses are all part of what you're paying to be able to invest, it's not really doing much good since money is fungible. In a retirement account with contribution limits, it still doesn't really make sense, since any contribution from outside funds to try to pay for expense ratios would be counted as contributions like any other. Again, I guess it could somehow help you account for how much money you wanted to contribute in a year, but I'm not really sure it would help you much. Some funds or brokerages do have non-expense-ratio-based fees, and in some cases you can pay for those from outside the account. And there are a couple cases where for a retirement account this lets you keep your contributions invested while paying for fees from outside funds. This may be the kind of thing that your coworker was referring to, though it's hard to tell exactly from your description. Usually it's best just to have investments with as low fees as possible regardless, since they're one of the biggest drags on returns, and I'd be very wary of any brokerage-based fees when there are very cheap and free mutual fund brokerages out there." The Employee Benefits Security Administration within the US Department of Labor is tasked with keeping track of pension and 401K programs. The even have a website to search for abandoned plans: it helps participants and others find out whether a particular plan is in the process of being, or has been, terminated and the name of the Qualified Termination Administrator (QTA) responsible for the termination.  The Employee Benefits Security Administration discuss all types of details regarding retirement programs. This document What You Should Know About Your Retirement Plan has a lot of details including this: If your former employer has gone out of business, arrangements should   have been made so a plan official remains responsible for the payment   of benefits and other plan business. If you are entitled to benefits   and are unable to contact the plan administrator, contact EBSA   electronically at askebsa.dol.gov or by calling toll free at   1-866-444-3272. There are also EBSA offices spread thought the United States "The title requires shreds of evidence to justify, first what are ""machine learning funds"", and what determines ""failure"".  When I click this title, I was hoping to see a list of ""machine learning funds"", are they mutual funds, or is the author talking about private equities invested in this field? Who are they?  Nothing in the paper made this clear.  For most of which to fail, I was expecting some statistics to indicate at least 51% of the funds liquidated due to massive loss of AUM. Again, no information on that.  The takes? Finance is hard, idiots like Marcos Lopez de Prado have no chance to master." "Assuming that the ETF is tracking an index, is there a reason for not looking at using details on the index?  Typically the exact constituents of an index are proprietary, and companies will not publish them publicly without a license.  S&P is the heavyweight in this area, and the exact details of the constituents at any one time are not listed anywhere.  They do list the methodology, and announcements as to index changes, but not a full list of actual underlying constituents. Is there a easy way to automatically (ie. through an API or something, not through just reading a prospectus) get information about an ETF's underlying securities? I have looked for this information before, and based on my own searches, in a word: no.  Index providers, and providers of APIs which provide index information, make money off of such services.  The easiest way may be to navigate to each provider and download the CSV with the full list of holdings, if one exists.  You can then drop this into your pipeline and write a program to pull the data from the CSV file.  You could drop the entire CSV into Excel and use VBA to automagically pull the data into a usable format. For example, on the page for XIU.TO on the Blackrock site, after clicking the ""All Holdings"" tab there is a link to ""Download holdings"", which will provide you with a CSV.  I am not sure if all providers look at this. Alternatively, you could write the ETF company themselves."