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Buy These 3 Balanced Mutual Funds for Attractive Returns

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Balanced funds offer investors the convenience of buying into a single fund rather than holding both equity and bond funds. This category of funds also reduces a portfolio’s volatility, while providing higher returns than pure fixed-income investments.

The fund managers also enjoy the flexibility of changing the proportion of equity and fixed-income investments in response to market conditions. An upswing may prompt them to hold a relatively higher share of equity to maximize gains, whereas a downturn will see them shifting loyalties toward fixed-income investments to stem losses.

Below, we share with you three top-ranked balanced mutual funds, namely Fidelity Balanced Fund (FBALX - Free Report) , State Farm Balanced Fund (STFBX - Free Report) and Schwab MarketTrack All Equity Portfolio (SWEGX - Free Report) . Each has earned a Zacks Mutual Fund Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and is expected to outperform its peers in the future. Investors can click here to see the complete list of funds.

Fidelity Balanced Fund aims for income and capital growth that is on par with reasonable risk by investing the majority of its assets in stocks and other equity securities and the rest in bonds and other debt securities. FBALX has returned 8.7% in the past three years.

FBALX has an expense ratio of 0.50% compared with the category average of 0.84%.

State Farm Balanced Fund seeks income and long-term growth of principal and income by investing its assets in common stocks, preferred stocks and bonds in proportions that vary with market conditions. It ordinarily maintains the majority of assets in common stocks but limits such investments to no more than 75% of the assets. STFBX has returned 9.2% over the past three years.

As of September 2022, STFBX held 175 issues with 19.4% of its assets invested in TOTAL US TREASURY BILLS.

Schwab MarketTrack All Equity Portfolio maintains a defined asset allocation in stock investments, with certain percentages for different segments of the stock market. SWEGX invests the majority of its net assets in stock investments. SWEGX has returned 10.2% over the past three years.

Patrick Kwok has been one of the fund managers of SWEGX since 2019.

To view the Zacks Rank and the past performance of all balanced mutual funds, investors can click here to see the complete list of balanced mutual funds.

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