Ask Terry Questions mutual fund fees & disclosures

mutual fund fees & disclosures

By Terry Savage on June 20, 2016 | Investments

This morning on WGN you mentioned FeeX.com to look up how much you are paying for mutual fund fees.

My wife’s 401K Plan is administered through ADP. Recently ADP started replacing some of the mutual funds with what they call “web only” funds. These are not the usual “similar” funds used for 401K type accounts that have similar ticker symbols to the essentially “same” fund on the open market. These “web only” funds, literally, have no ticker symbol. A call to the fund company yields absolutely no information regarding the fund. One fund company even told me they have no record of it and another that there isn’t any such fund.

All of this seems very peculiar to me. There is no transparency whatsoever as to what, exactly, the fund is holding. I perform comparative rate-of-change analysis on all of our stocks and funds daily. But with no ticker symbol or any other information about these funds I can’t see how well they are performing compared to other instruments.

It seems to me that these “web only” funds with no detailed information or the ability to track their performance compared to any or all other funds/instruments should be illegal.

Have you ever seen anything like this? Is there anything that can be done about it?

Terry Says:   I checked with my contact at FeeX.com and here is his response:

This is not unusual. We call those “private funds” or “repackaged funds”. We have a combination of technology and an analytic team that tries to uncover the underlying funds if such exist.   If he links his wife’s 401(k) account, we might be able to analyze his plan.

 

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