Bargains can still be found: Buy closed-end funds at a discount

— -- Timing is everything. Hit the website at the right time, and you get tickets to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Two seconds too late, and you're watching Bill and the Ankle Biters.

As far as we can tell — you never know what will happen next — the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index bottomed on March 9. It's up 34.1% since. You may feel you missed a chance to get the biggest bargains.

And you did. But you can still find plenty of bargains. The easiest to find are in closed-end mutual funds.

A closed-end fund is the earliest form of mutual fund and, frankly, they're relics of a bygone era. They have a structure that was first developed in the 1920s, and has long since been improved upon.

Like all mutual funds, closed-end funds are a professionally managed portfolio of stocks or bonds. And like exchange traded funds, you can buy and sell shares of closed-ends on the stock exchanges.

But unlike all other types of funds, closed-end funds issue a fixed number of shares. New closed-end funds raise money through an initial public offering and use that money to buy and sell stocks and bonds. In this sense, a closed-end fund is a bit like any company that's listed on the stock exchanges. One way to think of a closed-end fund is as a corporation whose business is buying and selling stocks.

What makes a closed-end fund peculiar is that its share price often doesn't reflect the value of its holdings.

Most closed-end funds sell at a discount, which has mystified academics for years. One theory is that closed-end funds don't liquidate very often. And if they were to sell all their holdings at once, they would have to do so at fire-sale prices.