Topic: How To Invest

Q: Hi Pat: I’d like your opinion on corporate-class mutual funds. Thanks for your attention over the years.

Article Excerpt

A: We think that mutual funds are okay to hold if you already own them, but we have moved away from recommending them in favour of lower-fee exchange-traded funds (ETFs). We feel that most fund investors should shift into ETFs wherever possible. (For that reason, we shifted our focus in our Canadian Wealth Advisor newsletter to ETFs.) Corporate class, or “tax-advantaged,” mutual funds are classes of funds that let you switch between individual funds within the class without having to realize a capital gain. You only pay capital gains when you move entirely out of a specific family of funds. However, tax-advantaged funds have higher MERs and lower returns. One reason is that they must hold larger cash balances to fund more frequent redemptions. With some mutual fund companies, that difference in cash-holding requirements is slight. In others, it’s more pronounced. The supposed advantage of these funds turns out to be a disadvantage in most cases. That’s because frequent trading can cause you…