When you invest in the stock market, you can spend many hours looking up stocks, researching the companies that issue them, and choosing just the right mix to round out your portfolio — or you can buy one or two mutual funds and let the fund managers do all the work for you. Given the overwhelming number of investments to choose from and the ocean of publicly available information to dive into, many investors choose the latter course. But before you start comparing mutual funds, it’s important to choose the fund strategy that will best meet your investing goals.