why arent my mutual fund prices for 12-27-07 showing in my portfolio?

This is an investing forum, not tech support for Yahoo Finance.

What is the name of your fund,dude? There is more than one, I am told.

Mutual fund prices (updated) don’t post until after the market closes. After the market closes for the day the NAVs are tallied and the new prices posted.

Yahoo finance glitch. All the people with brains must be on vacation.

Fund Prices

For example, if a $ 20 stock goes to $ 200 overnight, does it imply they’re going to sell 90% of their shares that day, to keep it in proportion? Likewise, if a $ 200 stock goes to $ 20 overnight, does it imply they’re going to buy 9 times as much of it as they already hold?

It probably depends on the index, but I think in most cases, no change would be needed if a stock just goes up or down based on news or simply sentiment. For example, if the index is set up to hold an equal number of shares of each of 100 stocks, whether the prices of the individual stocks go up or down doesn’t affect how much they own of each, just the value of the index. Even if the index was set up so that it started with a fixed dollar amount of each stock, I don’t think any changes would be needed because that was just the starting point. I don’t know of any index that is set up to constantly maintain an equal weighting by value of the stocks in the index every day which would be the only set up I can think of that would require them to sell or buy they way you mentioned in the question.

If a stock splits, that might require an adjustment (if the index requires an equal number of shares of each stock) but I don’t think regular price movements ever would.

As one example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is calculated by taking the sum of the share prices of the 30 stocks and dividing by a number that’s been adjusted over time to compensate for stock splits, changes in the stocks in the index, etc. It’s that simple – add up the 30 stock prices and divide by that number (which is a small fraction now so it actually acts like a multiplier). So that is an index that effectively has an equal number of shares of each stock. There’s no equal weighting or anything like that. IBM’s stock price is currently about 10 times as much as Alcoa’s, so a 1% move in IBM will have about 10 times the effect on the average as a 1% move in Alcoa would.

If Alcoa’s stock suddenly went up from $ 16 to $ 160, it would raise the index value considerably, but no adjustment in the number of shares owned by an index fund would be necessary.

Also, not all index funds track the index by actually buying exactly the number of shares of the component stocks. Many use futures contracts and various other techniques to approximate the movements in the index without actually owning every single stock in the appropriate amounts.

I want to invest in farmland without actually having to buy land. And I was hoping for something that actually parallels the price of land, that isn’t subject to the volatile ups and downs of the stock market as much, and that isn’t focused on a very particular area, and that isn’t dependent on profits, just land cost. Is there anything like this out there or coming soon?

I’ve never seen one that invests in raw land. There are many LLCs that do this. If you’re an accredited investor, they’d be available to you,