PALO ALTO, Calif. (CNN/Money) - If you're like me, you probably don't pay much attention to all the stuff that comes along with your year-end mutual-fund statements.

Here's a suggestion: This year, take a look. You just might be surprised either by how much -- or how little -- your fund managers have to offer.

By and large, what comes in the mail is a bunch of junk. But truly junky this time around are the returns on stock funds. If you don't find anything more encouraging from the fund managers -- like, for instance, some sense of how he or she plans to do better this year -- you might consider firing them as your money managers.

I sampled a handful of inserts, some from funds I'm in, some from funds that would like me to be in them. Unsurprisingly, it seems the funds' No. 1 task is to remind us that allowable IRA contributions have risen from $2,000 annually to $3,000. (Of course, they'd all be more than happy to manage that money for you.)

"Now, thanks to tax law changes, you can contribute more -- up to $3,000 to a traditional or Roth IRA," screams the Federated Kaufmann Fund, in bold letters.

Conflicts aside, they're right. If you can afford to max out on your IRA contributions each year you should. It's a small but meaningful way to tax-shelter a portion of your retirement savings. The fund companies also are happy to remind you that you have until April 15, 2003 to make contributions for the 2002 tax year. Remember, you don't have to put your money into any specific funds. Big fund complexes offer money-market funds, if safety is what you want most.

Federated also offers some sage reminders about the importance of asset allocation. "Individuals who have not reassessed their portfolios during the past two years, especially those who are over weighted in a single security, may need to refocus on asset allocation to reduce their exposure to investment risk."

That's a fancy way of saying: Sell your winners, buy your losers. It's not foolproof, but over time it works.

I was less impressed with what Credit Suisse Asset Management had to say in its fourth-quarter "Viewpoint." "Time will tell if policy announcements can help ease investors' concerns," is a fairly representative sample. Gee, thanks.

Of course, the big kahuna of investor letters, Warren Buffett's, comes out in late February. That's some of the best investment advice you can get.

Until then, watch your mailbox. And read the throwaways for a change.

In mid-December I polemicized in favor of Coca-Cola's decision stop giving quarterly earnings guidance. Investors, I argued, should be encouraged that companies like Coke will stop focusing on quarterly earnings and focus instead on longer-term metrics that are more important indicators of the health of their busineses.

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Another American consumer icon, McDonald's, said last week that it will stop the analyst hand-holding. It'd be easy to knock MickeyDs for ending the guidance game as it has begun to lose money (amusing headline in TheStreet.com: "McDonald's Has Forecast Its Last Loss"), but I still think it's doing the right thing.

Sun Microsystems also declined Thursday to offer an outlook for its current quarter and said it would discontinue its habitual mid-quarter updates. This is all good. Let companies operate and analysts analyze. No more spoon feeding. Should you see other examples of companies discontinuing the quarterly guidance game, please send them to me. Later I'll publish an updated list.

Nearly a year ago I quoted Silicon Valley lawyer Boris Feldman predicting that 2002 would be an unprecedented year for public companies re-stating their earnings, the point being that what was then mostly an Enron issue would never be confined to Enron.

Well, according to a new report from Huron Consulting Group, there were 330 re-statements in 2002, 22 percent more than in 2001. Huron's in a good position to know about re-statements. It's a 325-member firm based in Chicago, founded last year by refugees from the consulting wing of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm responsible for a handful of the most famous restatements.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.

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