They give you low-fee access to top stocks

Article Excerpt

Fund management expenses (MERs) can eat up a substantial proportion of your investment returns over time. That’s one reason why ETFs have become very popular. But there’s a segment of those funds with even lower MERs. Below, we analyze three of those ETFs providing investors with low-cost, broad-market exposure to Canadian, U.S. and international markets. The supplement on page 10 offers you even more information on the costs of ETFs versus mutual funds. BMO S&P/TSX CAPPED COMPOSITE ETF $22.95 (Toronto symbol ZCN; TSINetwork ETF Rating: Aggressive; Market cap: $4.0 billion) lets investors track the S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index. It selects stocks from a large universe of Canadian equities, while the fund’s stock weightings are based on their individual market capitalizations. Still, to improve diversification, all individual stock weights are capped at 10%. You’ll also find that kind of diversity reflected in the ETF’s industry allocations: Financials (32.6% of assets), Energy (16.2%), Basic Materials (10.9%), Industrials (11.3%), Telecommunications (5.5%), Technology (5.1%), Utilities (4.5%) and Consumer Defensive…