You will always have to shoulder some costs when it comes to investing. These costs and comparison are extremely important when investing, but many new investors seem to ignore them.
Types of Costs in Investing
Different types of investments carry different types of costs. For instance, mutual funds often charge what we call the expense ratio, or the measure of what it costs to manage the fund in percentage.
The fee is paid usually paid out of fund assets and it will come out of your returns.
The problem with high expense ratios is twofold. For one, a higher slice of your money goes to the management team instead of your pocket. Second, higher charges mean it will be more difficult for your fund to match or outperform the market.
Meanwhile, there are also different forms and sizes of fees to be found among other investments and investment vehicles, like brokerages.
Brokerage Fees
Account Maintenance Fee
The account maintenance fee is typically an annual or monthly fee charged for the use of the brokerage firm and its research tools. This type of fee is usually tiered, and most of the time, those who want to use more robust data and analytic tools have to pay more.
Sales Load Fee
Some mutual funds include a load or commission paid to the broker who sold the fund. Be careful when dealing with these fees. Many mutual funds nowadays are no-load, making them cheaper alternatives. Also, some brokers will push funds with larger loads to gain more revenue.
Advisory Fee
Also sometimes called the management fee, the advisory fee is the commission paid for the expertise of the broker in the form of wealth strategies. This fee is expressed in percentage of the total assets that the investor has under the broker’s management.
Commissions
Commission fees are the cost of executing any trade. This payment directly goes to the broker.
Keep in mind that full-service brokers that provide more complex services will often charge higher fees. Over the longer period, the burden of paying higher fees becomes greater.
Active and Passive Management
The type of management will also affect the type of fees you will have to shoulder.
Passive management refers to investments like mutual funds that are created to replicate or follow market indices such as the S&P 500 or the Russell 2000.
The managers of these funds change the holdings only if the index or fund used as benchmark changes. The idea behind passive management is to match the market’s return.
On the flipside, an active management strategy is a more hands-on approach. The fund managers make concerted efforts to outperform the market.
The goal is not to simply math the market’s returns. They make strategic moves that aim to exploit the value of the unrecognized opportunity in the market.
There are investors who argue that they get what they pay for. This simply means that although an active fund may charge higher fees, the higher returns are worth the expense because investors will earn back the charge plus more.
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