I’m down with the flu this week, which means I’m taking it easy – but not too easy. I’m catching up on some reading and found some nuggets of knowledge regarding mutual funds that you may not already know about and you may enjoy reading. So, without further ado (because I need to get to bed now), the blogs:

First up, from  The Oblivious Investor, comes
11 Tips for Selecting Mutual Funds. This short, concise list of things that matter (and why they matter) when picking a mutual fund will ensure you get in the right frame of mind, before you do anything rash and costly.

Next, the Amateur Asset Allocator has a great primer on the various Types Of Mutual Funds that will help sort out the differences between open-ended, closed-ended, indexed vs. actively managed and more.

And lastly, while we’re on the subject of index funds, Retirement Savior reminds us that some mutual funds do outperform indexes, and tells us when (and why) When NOT to Use Index Funds.

• Mutual Fund Monday - Blogosphere Feb 2010 Edition. It's Mutual Fund Monday again, and I thought that I'd do something a little different this week. Rather than focus on a single fund or concept about funds, I'm focusing on a topic and sharing some of the interesting posts I've found on other blogs recently about that topic. The......
• Beware Target-Date Funds! Target-date funds were supposed to be the ultimate idiot-proof investment vehicle for retirement savings. The idea is that asset allocation is the single most important factor in determining investing success, and most people get it wrong. Many others never even try because they find the concept too daunting. Many people......
• 5 Things to Do When You Have a Bad 401(k) Plan. 401(k) plans can be a great way to save for retirement and let your savings grow tax-free. But the plans are chosen by employers and managed by 3rd parties and don't always have the best options. IRAs give you the entire universe of investments to choose from, but most employers......
• A Possible Change to Mutual Fund Tax Implications on Capital Gains. Investors in U.S. mutual funds might want to keep an eye on this. The Committee on Capital Market Regulation (CCMR) has recently issued a report by Harvard professor John C. Coates which recommends that mutual fund regulators eliminate the requirement for yearly capital gains distributions. The change would only affect......
• Mutual Fund Monday: The Biggest Lies Mutual Fund Companies Tell. Chuck Jaffe at MarketWatch has a great piece that I thought I'd share for my (semi) weekly Mutual Fund Monday post this week. His article lists 7 ways that fund companies manipulate their stats to trick investors. It's all quite legal, since much of it depends on your the viewpoint......

• Mutual Funds Introduction It is really not much of an exaggeration for you to say that mutual funds are one of the best things that the middle class can take advantage of financially since the invention of sliced bread. What mutual funds do, is they allow for investors that have small amounts of......
• Mutual funds and fees Part of my retirement money is in a Class C mutual fund. It was originally opened as a rollover IRA. When I opened the fund several years ago I didn't know anything at all about investing. (Except that it was a good idea TO invest.) I still don't know much......
• Target Date Funds: Not One Size Fits All Target Date retirement mutual funds have exploded in recent years. Many of us have seen them - offerings from Fidelity, Vanguard, or a whole host of others. They're easy to pick and easily marketed - Fidelity Freedom 2010, Fidelity Freedom 2015, etc.  According to the Wall Street Journal, these funds had $7......
• Should Mutual Funds Be Moving Into Cash? Mutual funds are the best investment vehicle for people like you and me.  If you read any finance blogs, you're likely invested in them yourself (good job).  I've talked about them before in the College of Weakonomics series, so if you're a regular reader you should be good to go.......
• What is a Mutual Fund? Mutual fund is a corporate body, which works as an intermediary and invests in financial markets. Mutual funds collect money from the public and invest in financial instruments like equity, government securities, bonds, debentures etc.Investing through mutual funds is good for people who do not have much knowledge about......

By now, we now the sad story of the large national investment banks like Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup et. al.. Such examples give pause to investors, as they should, but they also taint the entire financial sector.

Believe it or not, there are many banks that stuck to lending and banking principles and never ventured into derivatives and toxic assets. Shares in these banks, usually small, regional banks, have taken a hit. Call it guilt by association. It’s unfair, but it creates great opportunity for investors who can stomach the kind of volatility that often accompanies such subjective discrimination.

Here are three smaller banks, recently recommended by SmartMoney magazine.

Provident Financial Services (PFS)
Provident is a well run, new jersey bank with a solid balance sheet and enough cash on hand to ride out the current recession. Provident has 82 branches and only 1.5% of their loans are “nonperforming”, which is well under the industry average. The stock trades at 1.1 times the tangible book value, which is cheap for any sector.

City National (CYN)
City National is located in Beverly Hills, CA and caters to the affluent (think high-end Hollywood). Analysts expect earnings to rise sharply in 2010. They currently have $28 billion in assets, and $13 billion in deposits. Though the price has fallen 26% on worries of exposure to California’s pummeled real estate market, analysts say that the bank has high quality assets and earnings should “rise significantly.”

TCF Financial (TCB)
While loan losses have been increasing, this Midwest bank has a stable deposit growth and commercial leasing business. This is by far the riskiest bank on the list, but it shouldn’t be destined for bailout/failure country. Analysts say the “repair work is ongoing”, which may make for a few more rocky quarters, but patient investors should be rewarded.

• Tips on Speculating in the Stock Market. I usually feel more in line with value investor Ben Graham's line of thinking, but after reading Jim Cramer's Real Money, I have come to see that there is a time and place for some of the speculator's techniques. Just because favor one school of thought, doesn't mean another doesn't......
• 3 Key Signals When Timing The Stock Market I'm not a practitioner of market timing, and I'm not a proponent of it. That being said, I read an article about it in a recent issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine that made me reconsider. To be fair, the article was more about timing big swings in the overall......
• Reliability of Income, the New ROI. The 2008-2009 market crash and resulting bear market have been absolutely brutal to new retirees and soon to be retirees alike. For those in my age set (about 30 years out from retirement) it serves as a poignant lesson of what can go wrong. To Mary Beth Franklin, editor of......
• 5 Energy Stocks To Invest In. Introducing the "new, pragmatic approach to energy investing" (as it is called by SmartMoney) - also known as the having it both ways approach. It's a new way to invest in energy stocks, and it mimics what the big oil companies themselves are doing. It's a hedge, really. It's investing......
• Is Apple Worth its iPad Tablet Hype? Apple Inc has generated a lot of buzz recently with the hype over its latest geek-chic techno status symbol - the Tablet. But is that hype really over-hype? Is Apple, and more important for investors - apple stock, going to benefit from this new gadget? I personally don't think so,......

• The entire $AIG research bag | socialone.info Another AIG update Posted on September 9, 2009. Filed under: Financial Markets, Global, TARP, US | Tags: Meltdown, RBS, AIG,Insurance, Aircraft Leasing, ILFC | Edit This As the world’s largest Aircraft Lessor, ILFC is still in play with a mountain of debt which was $17 billion even 12 months ago. ILFC and General Electric Co.’s GE Commercial Aviation Services, the world’s largest......
• Making the leap into single stocks -- a recap I chose January of 2008 to begin investing in single stocks for the first time ever. I put about $4600 into them over the year, investing a minimum of $200 each month plus several random lump sums now and then when I had extra money. As of year end my......
• Weakon 135: Stocks I'll say it, the stock is the single most important investment item in our current society. But what is it? A stock is a note acknowledging the ownership of one share of a company. If I have 1 share of JP Morgan stock, I can easily exchange that on......
• The BofA split with the govt | Reuters   Bank of America Corp will receive $20 billion 13 billion pounds in fresh government investments and a federal backstop against $118 billion of bad assets it holds to help it absorb Merrill Lynch & Co, U.S. officials said on Friday. As part of an emergency plan announced by the......
• History of Top 10 Banks of the United States [/caption] The year 2009 was not a very promising one as the global recession wounded the financial conditions of the world. The economic slowdown of the advanced countries that began as a result of sub-prime crisis in U.S.A., soon spread over across the globe. The banking sector was bound to......