Investing in Closed-End Funds: Tracking Your CEFs
Description
This article is from the A Guide to Closed-End Funds (CEFs).
Investing in Closed-End Funds: Tracking Your CEFs
Well, you took the plunge and bought your first few shares of a CEF that was trading at a particularly attractive discount. What next? It depends on your investment style and nature. Some of us cannot go to sleep without knowing how much we made or lost. Others throw the confirmation slip in the drawer and promptly forget about it. If you are a long-term investor, and planned your purchase well, you probably don't need to keep tabs on it every day. If you a short-term trader (some of us buy and sell the same day---it takes all types to push this world around :-)), you will be monitoring the price and discount carefully.
The market price of the CEF is printed in most newspapers under the stock listings of the exchange on which the CEF trades. For example, if the CEF is ABC and trades on the NYSE, look under A in the stock listings for NYSE. The line for ABC should give you the 52-week high and low for the CEF, the volume traded, the high, low and closing price, the price change, and other miscellaneous information such as the dividend yield, whether it went ex-dividend, etc.
The NAV of the CEF is published weekly in many newspapers including Monday's Wall Street Journal or Barron's, and Saturday's New York Times under the section "publicly traded funds" or "closed-end funds". Usually, the NAV, the market price, the discount/premium and the 52-week change is given.
Obviously, we hope you will use our service to track your CEFs, decide which ones to buy and sell, the price at which to trade, etc. We specialize in closed-end funds and our charts are specially tailored to give you maximum information for analyzing the CEF: the discount history of the CEF, its trading range and volatility, relative discount, and so forth. In addition, we provide charts that will facilitate comparison between CEFs that invest in similar markets.
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