U.S. broker Charles Schwab’s launch this week of 8 new exchange traded funds (ETFs) could be a watershed event for providers and users of ETFs and mutual funds. What’s remarkable is that they have fixed their management expense ratios (MERs) even lower than the Vanguard ETFs and are allowing their ...

In the previous post, I had linked to an article by a financial advisor who had painted a rather bleak picture in regards the level of service provided by financial advisors remunerated through trailer fees and other embedded commissions. It suggested that financial plans were performed at even lower rates than ...

A reader sent in an email with an interesting supplementary to the claim that trailer fees represent the cost of financial advice (in Part I). As you may recall, MacKenzie Financial’s publication claimed that an apples-to-apples comparison of ETFs to mutual funds required that the ETF orange be converted into an ...

Here is the second part of the post on the ETF vs. mutual fund debate ….

“For the first half of 2009, only 34.5% of Canadian Equity active funds outperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index,” reports SPIVA. However, some categories of active mutual funds did relatively well at beating their benchmarks over the six months:

In my last column, Securities lending wake-up call, I discussed securities lending, the practice whereby investment fund managers lend out securities to mainly hedge funds to sell short. As mentioned, the practice raises risk levels, dampens the value of securities at times, and generates sizable lending fees that are often ...

One thing I left out of the June 4 column on the investment-fund practice of securities lending is the role of incentives. Specifically, goes the argument, investment funds that take a large percentage of the revenues generated from securities lending may not be so bad after all since they have ...

Standard & Poor's has just released its 2009/Q1 scorecard for Canadian mutual-fund performance. Known as SPIVA, it shows how many actively managed mutual funds beat their benchmark indexes over various time intervals. Rather than throw out a bunch of numbers, which could get confusing, I’ll just copy SPIVA’s chart summarizing ...

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 ...

Morningstar Inc. has just released a study of the mutual-fund investing experience in 16 countries, ranking Canada seventh.