Well as you can see, it always pays to do your homework before investing in anything. I don't ever put my money into mutual funds, but when I'm lazy or overburdened at work I'll put money into ETF's rather than stocks, as with stocks I tend to only hold for a few days or until a run ends. With ETF's you can view basically all their holdings as opposed to only the top ones in mutual funds. Not to mention you can get in and out as you please, which helps on days like Feb 27 where you have no clue how long the downtrend will be and you don't feel like "holding and riding it out".

Then since you have a list of all the holdings you can look up info on all the individual companies to your hearts desire, whether to see if they are nice guys or to check ratings/charts on each stock so you can get an idea on their fundamentals or technicals.

Example: www.powershares.com/holdings.aspx or www.powershares.com/holdings.aspx

A quick trick for the latter (provided you have a unix type environment - well I just tested on macs) I have found is to copy the list into a spreadsheet like excel, then copy just the line of tickers into a text file for use in shell scripts with the 'open' command to open your favorite online chart tools so you don't have to type them all in, or copy that line of tickers into online screening tools like Nevellier's site (in this case, make a row of commas in the cells next to each ticker in excel first (you can do that on a PC)) etc.

I run someone else's acct who is pretty socially conscious, so I try my best to look into those things - its easier when you are dealing with just one company (stock), but when I use ETF's its nice to see their holdings to make sure there isn't some huge corp that will make someone squirm.

Pride fund?