Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, Ivana Hampton. It can sometimes seem like there's an

endless number of mutual funds for you to invest in. But not all of them are the

right fit for your portfolio, and some aren't worthy investments at all. A popular feature for

Morningstar's Fund Investor newsletter greatly shrinks the list and can help you home in on the winners.

Russ Kennel is the newsletter editor and senior principal

ratings for Morningstar Research Services, and he's here to brag about his thrilling funds list.

Thanks for being here, Russ. Glad to be here. Well, let's start with the idea behind a thrilling

fund list. How did this get started and what's the mission? Yeah, so the real idea is

let's focus on the things that are the best predictors that really matter the most for funds.

So you could arrive at a screen and find your funds by doing a lot of screens. But what I think

is maybe more important is instead to just limit it to just a few.

And when you do that, that allows you to really raise the bar.

So we're just going to screen on a few things, but we're going to be very demanding.

And with 15,000 mutual funds out there, you can be pretty demanding.

And I'm glad you brought up the number because you start with thousands of fund share classes. How do you narrow the list to a few dozen?

And what are you looking for? Yeah. So I'm picky. So one of the key things is it's always good

to start with expenses, right? So expense ratios in the cheapest quintile of the category.

Returns, I want returns of at least five years under the current manager and have to have

beaten their category benchmark, or in the case of allocation funds, their category return

average.

You also have to have manager investment of a million dollars or more, and you have to have risk that's not in the

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