Closed-end mutual funds, which have a fixed number of shares and are traded on stock markets, have been absolutely clobbered by the turmoil in the financial markets. Not only have their underlying net asset values gone done, but many of them are trading at historically high discounts to net asset value. There are even some municipal bond funds that normally trade at premiums that are currently trading at 25% or so discounts (in part because they are leveraged, but still, a 25% discount on a fund that will likely eventually regress to its historical mean of a small premium leaves a lot of room for error).
I’m not a fortune teller, so I don’t know whether this is a good time to invest or not. But I do know that if I owned an open-end fund, especially if I had a tax loss I could take, I’d be shopping around for a similar closed-end fund with a massive, historically unprecedented discount. For example, why own an open-end emerging markets income fund when you can own EDD at a 32% discount? (Disclosure: I don’t own this fund.) Why own an open-end corporate bond fund when a couple dozen closed-end corporate bond funds are selling at >25% discounts? And so on.
Two good websites for closed-end funds: www.cefa.com and www.etfconnect.com.