Painless Profiles

By Dr. Felix Kleinstein

Question from respected colleague:

Sometimes I hear about new funds or see some I'm not familiar with in new client accounts. K⁴ Fund Selection's two-page Profile Report is just what I need to get up to speed on them, but can I run it without having to know what scenario they're in?

Answer from Felix:

Your question reminds me of a problem that perplexed me for years as a child: Every time I’d ask my mom how to spell a word, she’d say, “Look it up in the dictionary.”I could never understand how I could look it up it up if I didn’t know how to spell it in the first place. You’ve got a similar issue here because you want to learn about a fund but don’t know where to find it to get the information you need. Although I’ve never figured out how to look up a word I couldn’t spell, I do know the answer to your question.

There are two ways to access the Profile Report. The quickest is by simply clicking on the “Profile” link under the fund’s name on the results page of a completed scenario. But that doesn’t answer your question. The only way this will work is if you can locate the fund in the appropriate scenario.

The second way is to use the “Find” feature located in the green bar at the top right of any K⁴ Fund Selection page once you leave Scenario Management. When you click on this link, you can either enter part of the fund’s name or its ticker. K⁴ will return a list of funds meeting your criteria. Click on the one you’re interested in and you’ll get a list of reports you can run for that fund. If your fund is in that particular scenario, one of the links will be “K⁴ Profile” and you can run the report from that link. Then again, if the fund isn’t in the scenario, you won’t get that option and you’re right back at square one.

The solution is to have a scenario you know the fund will be in. Since you know very little about the fund, you need a really broad scenario. For example, an equity scenario covering all stock funds - regardless of whether they’re large cap, small cap, growth, value, foreign, domestic or specialty - will do the trick. As long as you know the fund you’re evaluating is a stock fund, you can use “Find” within that scenario to locate and print its Profile Report.

You can actually create a scenario just for this purpose and then use it every time you need a profile report for a particular fund. It’s not hard at all. Start by giving it a name like “Profile for Equity Funds” or something equally original. On the Category Selection page, select all track records for stock funds and ETFs. On the Asset Selection page, check all boxes in the grey bars (Domestic Equity, Specialty Equity, Foreign Equity, World Equity, Regional Foreign Equity, and Emerging Markets Equity). This will populate all the check boxes on the page. Save the selections and go directly to the Results tab. (You really don’t need to select any attributes since you won’t be using the scenario for rankings anyway.) Click on “Find” at the top of the page, enter part of the name or the ticker of your fund, and create a Profile Report from the resulting links.

You’ll need a similar scenario for bond funds and, if you use hybrid (blended) funds, you’ll need one for them, too. To create them, simply copy your broad equity model and rename it “Profile for Bond Funds” or “Profile for Hybrid Funds.” On the Category Selection page, change the fund type from “Stock” to “Bond” or “Hybrid,” update selections, and again check off all the boxes in the grey bars on the Asset Selection page. Once you update and save selections, you can then look up your bond or hybrid fund using the Find link.

When you’re done, you’ll have three scenarios that will enable you to pull up Profile Reports on any fund you may encounter. Even if you aren’t sure if it’s a stock, bond, or hybrid fund, you only have three places to have to look. So K⁴ can easily take care of getting you quickly up to speed on any fund you encounter. Now all we need is someone to figure out how to look up words you don’t know how to spell.