How to Find the NAV for a Mutual Fund for Any Day

Digital media make tracking your fund NAV easy.

A businessman calculating expenses at tax time image by Christopher Meder from Fotolia.com

A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment pool. If you want to plunge into the stock market, a fund can provide a way to spread your risk with a diversified portfolio under the management of a professional. With multiple sources of digital and hard-copy financial information available, tracking the net asset value, or NAV, of a mutual fund is easy.

Step 1

Buy a copy of a daily financial newspaper such as the "Wall Street Journal" or "Investor's Business Daily." Go the stock market tables, which are in a separate, self-contained section of the paper, and look for a rubric on mutual funds. Most fund companies operate multiple portfolios, each with a specific investment theme. With print space limitations, however, not all funds are listed ("Fidelity Investments" alone ran 338 mutual funds as of October 2012). Find your fund family in the newspaper tables.

Step 2

Find your fund and look across the table. Several columns are present, including one titled "NAV." The NAV is the per-share value of the fund's entire portfolio. It is calculated by the fund once a day, after the market close, meaning you won't be able to get NAV from the streaming price quotes offered on the Internet or television. After NAV should be a column giving the fund's performance year-to-date (YTD).

Step 3

Go to the Internet, alternatively, and access a good financial site, which will offer complete information on the thousands of mutual funds in existence, as well as mobile apps that offer daily NAV and YTD performance quotes. Morningstar, for example, provides rankings and portfolio breakdowns in addition to NAV and performance data, as well as information on the fund manager and the fund's history. Yahoo and CNNMoney also offer comprehensive financial information, including mutual fund quotes.