We received an E*Trade marketing
email on friday advertising a new fund. The subject line sounded sensible: "how
to survive an up-down market". But looking closer, there was no great insight. The conlcusion was to diversify. Less likely to help you to survive the
market, than to better correlate to the ups and the
downs. In fact digging deeper the Beta of the fund to the S&P was 0.98.
The pont for us at Covestor is that these sorts of instruments are just plain bad for consumers. In this example the product was a fund of funds that looks, acts and
markets itself as an index tracker. So while their gross expense ratio is not
excessive for actively managed money (1.82% gross expense) – that’s not the real
cost compared to a simple index tracking ETF. They are investing in funds that
themselves charge fees. Fees on fees.It is worthwhile paying for talent, but can’t be sensible to pay a premium for a product that chases the
average.
