The International Investor

Management costs vs marketing costs

Jan 132013

Last week’s Wall Street Journal had a short piece about the work of an exchange traded fund manager. While brief, it gives some obvious insight into why expense ratios for ETFs can be so much lower than those for traditional actively managed funds:

At 30 years of age, Hao-Hung (Peter) Liao leads a handful of portfolio managers at Van Eck Global who oversee some $24 billion in investor assets around the world. Mr. Liao’s rapid ascent—and the parallel success of his tiny team in handling its outsize mission—owe a great deal to the unique traits of the investments in which the team specializes: exchange-traded funds.
…
Such ETFs are easier to manage than index-tracking mutual funds. A single person or small team can oversee a long list of ETFs, as Mr. Liao and his team do. Indeed, 87% of Van Eck’s ETF assets are in the 38 funds run by Mr. Liao and his staff of three portfolio managers and analysts.

Fee changes at OCBC and DBS

Updates

Jan 062013

There are a couple of updates to fees at two Singapore brokers. OCBC Securities has slightly reduced its commissions on the higher tiers for Singapore stock trades – trades S$50-100k are now 0.22% from 0.275% and trades above S$100k are now 0.18% from 0.20%. This brings it in line with most of its local peers for online Singapore trades.

It’s a small change, but at least it’s in the client’s favour. DBS Vickers appears to have gone in the opposite direction. A reader has pointed out some significant alterations to the firm’s fee schedule for some international markets. (These apparently came in a little while ago, but neither I nor anyone I know uses DBS, so I wasn’t aware of it until now.)

How fees affect investment fund returns

Investment

Aug 192011

Most investors understand that the fees they pay to fund managers have an impact on their investment returns. But it’s easy to overlook quite how large that impact can be. It’s also easy to focus on the wrong fees – putting a lot of effort into reducing one, when it’s the other that matters more.

So exactly how much do fees matter and what should you do to cut costs? Let’s take a look at a real example.

Before we begin, let’s recap what fees we’re looking at. There are two different sets of fees that fund management firms normally charge. One is the entry fee or initial charge, a one-off fee levied when your investment goes into the fund. The other is the annual management charge, which is levied on a recurring basis.

There are some other possible fees to keep in mind. For example, an exit fee might be charged when you withdraw your money or a performance fee levied when returns pass a certain hurdle. But these are less common and so we’ll leave them out for simplicity.

What will my stock broker charge?

FAQs

Comparing international stockbrokers can be difficult because their charges aren’t consistent. Some will charge flat fees, some a percentage of the trade value, some will impose administration fees, while others will charge an extra fee if you don’t trade frequently, and many other variations.

What’s more, the question of which broker is best depends on how these costs interact with how you trade. There’s no one answer to “which is the cheapest broker?” – and in any case, cost is just one consideration along with quality of service and range of markets.

But it’s helpful to have a grasp of the different way that brokers charge and how a low headline rate can be offset through charges in the small print. So this article discusses some of the most common fees that are listed in the international stockbroker comparison table.