Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of February 28, 2017

Article Excerpt

Dear Inner Circle member, ETFs, or exchange traded funds, started out as a discount alternative to mutual funds. The costs of investing in an ETF are much lower than costs associated with a conventional mutual fund, and early ETFs focused on simpler goals. Instead of picking and trading investments, operators of early ETFs managed investors’ money “passively,” with the goal of duplicating the performance of a market index. This lets the operator charge an MER (management expense ratio) of as little as 0.1%, compared to an average MER on conventional mutual funds of 2.6%. Thanks to the lower fee, early ETFs routinely performed better than many actively managed mutual funds. That’s because only a minority of mutual funds beat the index by a wide enough margin to offset their MERs. However, like a lot of investment products, ETFs later became far more varied, and more profitable for the operators. ETFs can cut the cost of investing, but they can lead you to balloon your…