facebookLooking to invest (RSS) but after reading still unsure between ETF and mutual funds/unit trust. What would be the difference ? Which would you choose over an another for long term capital growth? - Seedly

Anonymous

13 Mar 2020

General Investing

Looking to invest (RSS) but after reading still unsure between ETF and mutual funds/unit trust. What would be the difference ? Which would you choose over an another for long term capital growth?

I am unable to find what would be the main reason as to why people invest predominantly in ETFs, is it due to popularity? Why is a mutual fund/unit trust not so popular? My investment would be around SGD 200 monthly. For mutual funds, do you carefully select the fund base on the fund manager/fund company?

Discussion (13)

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Edwin Koh

13 Mar 2020

Software Engineer Lead at Rhine Digital

UT are just trying to beat the index but most of the time underperformed.

so why try to beat the index , might as well buy ETF that follow the index and with a lot lower in fees, even if you outperform the profit will still be eaten away by the high fees of UT​​​

It's all about costs (=fees). UT's are something to avoid (with very rare exceptions).

Unit Trusts (the contemporary version) are almost obsolete because of the prohibitively high annual fees (often 1.5 - 1.9 % per year, then often also inital sales charge of up to 5% depending on Your broker/bank, add the inflation rate to contemplate the performance pressure for a decent 'real' return above 0%).

For almost any region, country, sector or strategy there today are passive index ETFs

that at minimum have only 0.07% annual fee, and when they are expensive about 0.80 % per year. There are also many studies that show that active (UT) managers are not capable to beat the returns of passive indexing (ETFs) over longterm.

more on my thinking here:

https://seedly.sg/questions/what-is-your-genera...

Just an example add on for UT versus ETFs:

AIA Global Technology Fund

annual fees: 1.5 %

sales charge: 1.5 % (up to 5 %)

Fund over 5y, 10y and longterm did underperform it's own Benchmark MSCI World Information Technology Index, as depicted in the fund's factsheet.

Just for comparison f.ex. a cheap ETF alternative:

Xtrackers MSCI World Information Technology Index UCITS ETF 1C

annual fees: 0.30 %

sales charge: 0.0 %​​​

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Pang Zhe Liang

18 Feb 2020

Fee-Based Financial Advisory Manager at Financial Alliance Pte Ltd (IFA Firm)

Before you start investing, it will be best to understand your objective. Here are some questions to...

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