The search for and compilation of mutual funds (etc) for retirement accounts is messy and tedious. And once you have some picked out, more than you can afford to buy yet, how do you keep track of them?

I searched fairly thoroughly and did not find a useful tool. But I did find that Fidelity has a pretty good tool to narrow down funds by several useful attributes: the Fund Evaluator.

What it does not do is narrow down funds based on whether they are eco- or socially-friendly (there are other sites for that though) nor can you exclude certain companies a fund might be invested in (Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, petroleum companies, ahem). But the latter you can do yourself (though tedious) since all funds list at least the top 10 companies they invest in. I like to use Google Finance for getting the bare-bones details of a fund. It’s clean, spartan, and adequately organized.

So anyway, I wanted the whole of the funds I find to be “balanced”, “diversified”, something like that. I’m no investing guru (it’s one of my least favorite topics in personal finance), but I figured I’d start with some domestic funds, sprinkle on a few international ones, and then spread all those out over the 9 different categories (aka the Tic Tac Toe board) — large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap; value, blend, growth. And then I made a chart. As you can see, I didn’t have the same luck finding the same number of funds for each category. But, close enough.

What I really want is some piece of software (or better yet, and online application) that would function like my chart and its categories, plus have the added functionality of being able to exclude certain companies and also query out, say, the minimum investment for each fund for my IRAs. Then you could sort by any attribute and also have an index of all the funds you chose, even though they’re spread out over (almost) 9 categories.