Many investors use a wide variety of strategies to try to help them get insight from the best minds on Wall Street, but often they overlook a fairly simple way of following some of the brightest minds out there. Look for the top mutual fund performers, through a venue such as Yahoo’s Mutual Fund Search and try starting out your search there.

For example, if you are looking for large cap growth stocks go to the large cap growth section of top performers and look at the top performers for different time periods. If you are a long-term investor it is usually best to take the closest look at mutual funds that have done very well over the 3 and 5 year period rather than something as short as a 3 month period. After arriving at the list click on the desired mutual fund and then look at their top 10 holdings. Yahoo shows you these as a % of the overall mutual fund portfolio, which is helpful because it helps you know just how much of a stake the mutual fund has in that particular stock. Look at some of the top mutual fund holdings and write them down or keep them in a word document and do further research on these names yourself.

By using this kind of a method what you are doing is you are getting a great starting point and free advice from some of the best pros out there. There aren’t many other ways on Wall Street that you can get advice from the best without paying a huge amount. Keep in mind that these holdings aren’t released immediately so this is definitely a method for long-term investors and not traders to use.

Start incorporating the research from top mutual fund managers into your investment decisions and get yourself ahead of the game.