Should you bother about a fund's portfolio?

Investors choose or reject mutual funds according to a variety of criteria. Useful ones are obvious, like track record of returns, volatility, suitability to one's needs and other things like that. Obviously, there are unsuitable ones like brand image or the pushiness of the salesperson, to name just two that, in my experience, are the most common. However, one way of choosing mutual funds that sounds legitimate and yet is utterly wrong is to study and evaluate the fund's underlying portfolio and second guess it. This approach is based on the idea that investors should choose funds on the basis of the funds' portfolios. Unfortunately, there's no shortage of people who try to do this. The strange thing is that this style of analysing mutual funds is prevalent not just among investors but even among some analysts and in parts of the financial media. Generally, the approach taken by this kind of analysis is t