(MONEY Magazine) – If you don't have the patience or legal training to absorb 30-page fund prospectuses, here's welcome news. At the urging of the SEC and the Investment Company Institute, a trade group, the sponsors of 24 funds will now send you lite versions of their prospectuses. The funds are sold by American Express, BankAmerica, Capital Group International, Dreyfus, Fidelity, Scudder Stevens & Clark, T. Rowe Price and Vanguard. Called profile prospectuses, the four- to six-page brochures will be sent to would-be investors along with standard prospectuses in a yearlong experiment. After reviewing the profiles, Money is rooting for the SEC to make them mandatory for all funds. The brochures concisely cover each fund's goals, investment strategies, risk, expenses and seven other topics. Each profile also includes a bar chart that shows a fund's long-term performance. Yet conscientious investors should still consult a fund's full-length prospectus. One reason: Starting in September, the SEC will require funds to note only in their regular prospectuses how much they pay to brokerage houses in commissions and fees. Funds will also have to deduct those costs from their reported yields. Previously, such expenses were taken into account when determining a fund's total return but not disclosed in its prospectus.

Fund launch. Investors who've poured nearly $500 million into small-cap funds (see page 102) so far this year have a new option. Wasatch Advisors opened its Micro-Cap Fund (no load; 800-551-1700) on June 19. Fund manager and Wasatch founder Samuel Stewart, 53, plans to invest in 30 to 40 companies with market capitalizations of less than $150 million that are growing faster and have a better cash-to-debt ratio--than the typical large company.

Words of wisdom. As Rep. Jack Fields (R-Texas) pushes to permit funds to sell shares to investors before they receive prospectuses, outgoing SEC Commissioner Richard Roberts remarks: "The biggest frustration I had was the painfully large number of enforcement cases I saw in which investors relied solely on verbal promises of large returns."

--Lani Luciano