This week I spoke to Tom Bradley, president of Steadyhand Investment Funds Inc., a Vancouver-based, mutual-fund group launched in April, 2007. He wanted to fill me in on what his funds were all about (I had inadvertently overlooked them in an article I did on low-fee funds awhile back).

Oh my! Mackenzie Financial, the biggest mutual-fund family  in Canada, has fired a broadside at exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Financial columnists Ellen Roseman and Jon Chevreau have recently commented on the critique, which can be found on the Mackenzie Financial website under the title ‘I thought I wanted an ETF.’ Here are ...

I have been thinking for a while about posting on “securities lending,” the practice where mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) lend out securities in their portfolios to mainly hedge funds for short selling. But Jason Zweig’s May 30 column in the Wall Street Journal beat me to it and ...

Mutual funds have thrived despite a wave of critical studies and books, one of the latest being The Investor's Dilemma (2008) by Louis Lowenstein. In my May 22 column, Are mutual funds a rip-off? I offered some possible explanations why the industry has held up, such as the value-added derived ...