What Is The Real Cost Of A Mutual Fund?

Mutual funds are considered to be the safest and secured way for investing money. Traditionally banks were the only mode of saving money with less risk.

DSC stands for Deferred Sales Charge, and most class B mutual funds are DSC funds. This is something that you should really be on the lookout for. When you buy a mutual fund with a DSC you are not paying your financial advisor a commission directly but the fund company will pay your advisor a healthy commission, usually 5%. On top of the commission your advisor still gets a trailer fee, normally about 0.5%. Although you do not pay the commission out of pocket when you buy the fund, you are the one who ends up paying for it.

There are short term, middle term and long term investments and in order to witness exponential growth you will need to invest your money in top mutual funds. People having excess money but no time to invest in stocks may find mutual funds to be the best option. There are lots of companies that have evolved with time and have been performing well in the market and are considered to be safe by almost all the investors. It gives you an opportunity to attain various stocks and bonds. Top mutual funds have the best fund managers who have a vast exposure in the market.

In Feb 2010 Standard & Poor’s launched its most recent Canadian Indices Versus Active Funds Scorecard with data for the five year period ending December 31, 2009. Below are a couple quotes from the report. “Over longer periods, we continue to observe indices outperforming the majority of domestic funds. In three-year and five-year periods, only 12.5% and 7.4%, respectively, of actively managed Canadian Equity funds have outperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index.”

I took the most widely owned Canadian equity fund, the RBC Canadian Equity Fund and compared the holding to the RBC Canadian Index Fund. The data used is from the RBC 2009 semi annual report which had the holdings as of June 30, 2009. The majority of the investments held in the two funds, 77.36%, were the same, with 22.64% being different. It is only the returns of this 22.64% of unique assets of these two funds and total fees which will have an impact on the variance of their returns. The MER of the RBC Canadian Equity Fund was 1.97% and the RBC Canadian Index Fund was 0.68% a difference of 1.29%.

There is a maximum commission the advisor is allowed to charge, set by the fund company, but there is no minimum. It is possible for your advisor to sell you this type of fund and not charge you a commission at all. If you pay a commission this money goes to your financial advisor and the firm they work for. In addition to this commission your financial advisor will collect a trailer fee directly from the mutual fund company as long as you own the mutual fund. These trailer fees are normally about 1% and are paid from the MER of the fund.

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