Mutual funds

More than half of these funds have fees higher than 75 basis points.

The ready-made strategies have been around for years, but in an era of fee wars and ETFs its popularity is exploding.

Market recovery has made the risk of missing out more pronounced this year, forcing many funds to position themselves towards historically bullish levels.

Clients opened almost 1.2 million retail accounts, boosting flows to mutual funds and ETFs, the firm reports.

Fees for the category's best performing mutual funds and ETFs are much like the price of bullion: expensive.

While Guinness Atkinson pursues the first full mutual fund-to-ETF conversion, similar moves have begun elsewhere in the fund industry.

The fund industry's latest arrivals underline the seismic shifts underway in the business of asset management.

If clients “looked just three months ago, these numbers would be glaringly different,” an expert says.

The funds have recorded $248 billion in net inflows in 2020, up about 5% from this time last year.

The 20 top-performers have generated gains well over 50% in the first seven months of the year.

The firm allegedly didn't disclose its parent company paid a teacher union entity $10,000 a month “for its exclusive endorsement” as its preferred financial services partner, according to the regulator.

“No one could have envisioned what this virus was going to do to the commercial real estate space,” an expert says.

Investors may be put off by the costs associated with these funds, which had an average expense ratio of more than triple their peers.

Almost 90% of smaller fund managers would no longer have to report their investments and their firms would save $136 million a year, the agency estimates.

The firm announced plans in March to acquire $200 million of its stock and has been in the market on average once every three trading days since.

As more active strategies embrace the exchange-traded model, the landscape may be shifting.

The funds had posted gains over the past decade, but have suffered losses amid this year's coronavirus-driven volatility.

Still, clients continue to invest their assets into the industry’s cheapest funds and are saving billions as a result.

As asset managers launch funds with this new structure, lack of familiarity may hinder advisors’ adoption of them.

"It's now June and if you’ve been on a deserted island for the last five months you couldn’t have fathomed the movements we’ve seen," an expert says.