‘Mutual Fund’ Google Searches At 4-Year Low

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It rained all weekend in the Chicago area. That’s my excuse for why I ran a Google Trends search on “mutual funds.”

I really was just wasting time on Google Trends. It was idle curiosity that drove me to see how “Lehman” searches spiked recently and I also ran a Bear Stearns search, both just to confirm my suspicions that they’d probably enjoyed relative search obscurity until this year.

But then I ran a “mutual funds” search. Early Saturday morning, I’d read a Wall Street Journal article about the “ostrich effect,” which quoted Vanguard as reporting that their mutual fund shareholders checked their account values far less often in June than they did in mid- to late 2007, when the market was up.

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Interactive Graph Simplifies A Complicated Competitive Message

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Quarterly performance communications are an ensemble production. And yet for all the quick but careful contributions made by players across an organization, the work is largely unsung. “It’s time to make the donuts”–former colleagues of mine used to invoke the old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial when referring to the tedium of periodically updating the data.

Even less satisfying is the work involved in trying to communicate relative performance-in print, the story is reduced to lots of numbers with not much impact. So, here’s a shoutout to the collaborative effort at Vanguard Voyager Services that has figured out an interactive way to tell the story every quarter.

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