The most reliable way to establish or compare the performance of any investment is, to have a look at how it is rated in the stock market or even in the local dailies. Mutual fund ratings are easy to look at and understand. The rating goes a long way in helping an investor determine whether any type of investment he intends to take up is worthy, as a long or short-term investment. In a way, one is able to gauge how risky an investment is.

Mutual fund rating is done through a number of systems, which have all proved to be useful and very reliable. The most commonly used rating system is by the Morningstar. The method is simple and easy to understand. The top 10% investments are given 5 starts, the following 22.5% get 4 stars, the next 35% get 3 stars, the next 22.5% get two and the remaining 10% get just one star. With the stars and the number or investments rated, you are able to determine which ones are more reliable and most preferred.

Mutual fund rating helps an investor to make comparisons on the different categories that there are under these investments. A number of web sites on the Internet will help you find these ratings, they could be from morning-star or other rating systems. The software available for the ratings lets you type in the ticker symbol of the investment you want to check out and then the rating is displayed for you to see. You can check out what the rating on a particular day was.

There are many methods and systems that are used for the ratings, Morningstar system being the most common. Another one is the Lipper Rating System which provides mutual reviews and analysis of data for easier consumer consumption. Lipper System covers more than 80,000 investments and is also based on a scale of one to five, just like the Morningstar rating.