There are many options for buying a group of securities in one product. The most popular ones are mutual, segregated, and exchange-traded funds. They share that these products are an easy way to buy a group of securities at once instead of buying each stake individually. The fund can also proportion the guards so you, the individual investor, do not have to. There are two main classifications for what type of fund you can purchase in terms of costs. Knowing how these costs work is important to avoid paying too much for this convenience. These products differ in how they are administered, access to the products, and their prices.
Active Versus Passive Investing
Before getting into which of the products are suitable for you, some aspects need to be considered to understand the product variations.
Active investing is when someone (a portfolio manager) picks the stocks in the fund and decides how much of each one to hold (the weighting). This portfolio manager would also monitor the portfolio and decide when a security should be sold off, added to, or have its weighting decreased. Since ongoing research, meetings, and analysis must be done to build and monitor this portfolio, this fund manager would have research analysts and administrative personnel to help run the fund.
Passive investing has the same setup as active investing. Still, the portfolio manager would copy a benchmark rather than decide what securities to buy or how much of each one to buy. An example is a collection of securities against which the fund is compared to see how well it performs. Since everything in investing is about how much money you can make and how much risk it takes to make that money, every fund out there is trying to compare to all of the other funds of the same type to see who can make the most money. The basis for the comparisons is the benchmark, which compares peers or funds managed the same way. Comparisons, in general, are done only for returns. The equation’s risk aspect is handled by looking at what type of securities the fund holds or how specialized the fund is.
How Do I Know By the Fund Name If it is Active or Passive?
The short answer is that you must learn how the fund manager operates the fund. Some clues to learn more quickly if the fund is active or passive are given next. If they intentionally try to pick securities according to some beliefs about the market, this is active management. If the fund description talks about “beating the benchmark” or “manager skill,” it is actively managed. Another clue is to look at the return history. The fund is actively managed if returns vary versus the index by different amounts each year. Lastly, the fees may be expensive and have sales loads.
If the fund’s name says “Index” or “Index fund,” there is a good chance that the fund is passively managed. If the fund’s word says “ETF,” this could be a passive fund, but you need to ensure this because some ETFs are active funds but managed in a certain way. Most of the passively managed ETFs are provided by BMO, iShares, Claymore, Vanguard, and Horizons in Canada and Powershares, Vanguard and SPDR (or Standard and Poors) and others if the holdings are from the U.S. Most of the other companies would have actively managed funds only. If the fund description states that the fund is trying to “imitate” the performance of an index or benchmark’s performance, it is copying the index and is passively managed. From the return perspective, passively managed funds will be close to the index they claim to imitate but slightly less due to yearly fees. The amount that the returns are under the index will be nearly identical each year unless there are currency conversions or variances in cost, which may come from currency fluctuations or hedging that the fund may do. Passive funds typically do not have sales loads as they are geared toward people who invest for themselves.
Some funds try to mix active and passive management. These funds can be assumed to be actively managed, although their results will be closer to the benchmark than most other funds, so this is something to consider if the index’s variation is a factor.
Types of Costs
Whatever product you buy, there will be a cost associated with buying, keeping, and selling it. This will be true whether you have an advisor versus doing it yourself and whatever institution you attend. Even buying your stocks will have trading fees, which you must account for. However, how much you pay for each product and the advice will make a large difference in what return you will get after everything is completed.
There are many costs to be aware of when deciding which products to invest in. This article will focus on the passive funds that comprise a growing selection of retail investors’ products.
The Management Expense Ratio (MER)
This is the highest cost for most funds and represents the cost of managing the fund. “Managing the fund” means running the investment company, advertising, overhead, and the cost for the advisor or salesperson when it applies. Administrative costs like GST within the fund and accounting for trades and record keeping are also part of this cost. The MER is given as a percentage, which is the percentage of the assets that the fund manages or invests over a year.
If you have $100,000 invested in a fund, and the MER is 0.5% per year, you pay $500 annually to keep this fund. The cost is subtracted from the return, and what you see in your investment statement is your return net of fees or after fees. The Management Expense Ratio is the management fee plus the administrative costs. The administrative costs are usually between 0.05% and 0.1% of the fund’s assets. If the information you obtain states a “Management Fee” instead of a “Management Expense Ratio,” you must add the administrative costs to get the true fee. Seek out the prospectus and look up fund operating costs to find exactly how much the number is.
