This book is a treasure trove of practical research and pithy thoughts based on Gastineau's decades of experience; a valuable guide for the thoughtful investor. It will jar armchair mutual fund investors out of their PJ's. If you think checking out your funds in Morningstar and Lipper has you covered, you best read this book.

This book is a must-read for fund investors. Gastineau carefully discusses many important factors such as taxes, capital gains overhang, trading costs, turnover, benchmark selection, active management, expense ratio, and aggressive trading by market timers. These factors significantly affect fund performance but may be ignored by investors. Gastineau goes on to build a strong case for choosing ETFs over mutual funds, especially for long-term investors.

Gastineau's message is very powerful. He not only challenges some conventional wisdom on investing, but truly emphasizes how to add value to a portfolio. What is unique is his ability to move quickly from the big picture to implementation strategies offering investment solutions to both investment advisors and individual investors. Portfolio adjustments discussed can potentially have significant impact on a long-term investor's standard of living.

This is not a typical investment book. While it covers critical investment and planning topics, it focuses on providing a unique, effective approach to picking mutual funds and ETFs. It is written for investors who want to own funds that turn away market timers, operate efficiently, and deliver solid returns.

Author and financial professional Gary Gastineau starts with the proposition that index funds usually have better performance than actively managed funds because they have lower costs. He explains how and why it is better to select funds based on indexes that are less popular and more efficient than widely used indexes like the Russell 2000 and the Standard & Poor's 500. Then he shows you how to find funds with lower expenses, including lower transaction costs. He also offers hope for a better breed of actively managed funds.

You'll learn to:
* Choose funds with superior shareholder protection policies
* Reduce costs with funds that follow efficient indexes
* Compare and evaluate funds using reliable information
* Achieve broad diversification, the first line of risk management
* Postpone capital gains taxes
* Evaluate the performance of fund managers objectively

This accessible guide alerts you to problems inherent in some types of funds—embedded costs and vulnerability to timers—that can sabotage your returns, and discusses how to avoid funds that are used by market timers. You'll also discover how to reduce your exposure to hidden fees and transaction costs, inaccurate fund data, the Alternative Minimum Tax, and taxable capital gains distributions. Gastineau even names some winning funds and explains why they are successful.

From financial planning to considering cost and tax features when picking winning funds, Someone Will Make Money on Your Funds—Why Not You? gives you the investment information you need from an objective expert you can trust.

This book really has all of the information that most investors will need to build a mutual fund portfolio using ETFs or index funds. Gastineau explains how ETFs work, and makes recommendations for creating mutual fund stock portfolios with either ETFs or index funds. Gastineau's approach is conservative, and seems to take a fairly orthodox modern portfolio theory approach to investing, ie., preference for index funds over actively managed funds, and emphasis on controlling risk through asset allocation.

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