Is there a formula I can use to calculate a mutual fund price (various stocks) before market close?

Mutual funds are composed of various stocks. The mutual fund price is calculated after the close of the market at 4pm each trading day. I would like to know if the stocks in the fund are known, can I use a spreadsheet of the stock prices at a given time during market hours to caluclaute mutual fund price so that I buy or sell the mutual fund or other mutual funds before the close of the market? My 401k only sells and buys funds after the close of the market day at 4pm EST. This will help in timing of trades to increase my account balance. How can I construct this formula without buying a software program? I have access to the Excel program, if this is useful. Thanks

You can't do that. The information is confidential. Or else, all investors will buy what Buffet is buying or selling. You might want to invest in stock market if you prefer frequent trading.

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Your idea can't be done. You won't have the data they because you won't know how many shares of each stock they have at any point in time during the day and those quantities could change by the minute as well as the price of each stock. That's why mutual funds only update their prices once a day. I think when you sell mutual fund shares, you are selling at the previous day's closing price, so if a fund goes down the day you buy, you lose money right away

You can't "time" buys & sells inside a 401(k), you have no control over when the trades will actually execute, silly goose!

The trade price for all mutual funds is the close price.

I don't understand how you knowing the closing price would give you any edge. The NAV is the value of the portfolio minus any fund expenses divided by the number of shares. It is what it is. You might think you could sell the basket of stocks and buy the mutual fund but since the NAV is the actual value, not a market-derived price you're trying to make money by changing a $20 dollar bill for 4 $5 dollar bills.

Plus, you can't do it.

No mutual funds give real time descriptions of their portfolios. They do this, in part, to keep hedge funds from figuring out when they're trying to build a position in a particular stock and front running them.

If you did have the real time information you still couldn't do it since you wouldn't know the precise liabilities of the fund. (these liabilities include expenses accrued but not yet paid such as brokerage commissions, custody expense, fund admin. and accounting, etc.).

If I understand you correctly, you want to forecast the mutual funds' end-of-day NAV (price) a few hours early so that you can make buy/sell decisions without any nasty surprises.

Oh, boy... The information you need is pretty straightforward, but the mutual funds' investments at any given time are confidential. The best you can do is come close. And the way you could do this is (1) find a mutual fund with a low turnover rate, (2) take the last holdings report for the fund and build a spreadsheet with each stock and its respective percentage in the fund, (3) build an update process for each stock's share price (see below), and (4) see how close your spreadsheet's day-to-day increase/decrease matches with the fund's NAV increase/decrease. You should be able to come close, but you will never be able to know if the fund managers buy or sell into significant positions--until the funds' new holdings are published.

Note that you just have to get close to the NAV and don't have to track stocks that make up an insignificant percentage of the fund.

Okay... There are probably countless methods to get updated stock prices. One simple one is to use Excel's web query capabilities. From the menu, select data/import external data/new web query. As an example, if you were trying to track the S&P 500, you could grab information about the four largest stocks. Enter the address "http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=xo... at the top. Then select the yellow arrow that represents the data table. Click import to get the data into your spreadsheet.

A little tinkering around and you should be able to get the prices into the cells you want. To refresh the data in the spreadsheet, right click the table and select refresh.

For a lot of data points, I will create multiple tables and web queries, each on a seperate sheet. Once in a while, I may have to go back in and reselct the data table in the query. Not a big deal. Beats typing in each stock price.

I hope this helps.

When you buy units in a fund, the price you pay is the one to be calculated at the next valuation point. if you can calculate the price just before then you will be quite close to the actual price you will pay.

But for that you will have to know the complete portfolio of the fund and their charges and expenses which are only published twice a year and are about two months old. Do you think if it were possible to make such a killing, someone would not have done it already?