"Have mutual fund costs gone up or down?" in Wealth Manager (Dec. 2006)

For most advisors, it’s a no-brainer to pick the fund with lower expenses, assuming the fund’s style, market capitalization and other major factors are equal. After all, expenses subtract directly from returns. And now that mutual funds seem to have settled into an era of single-digit returns, the impact of fees is more visible to investors than it was in the high-return 1990s. But controversies swirl around several topics related to fees, including their fairness, their correlation with higher fund returns, whether they’re rising or falling, and whether fund firms are responding adequately to advisor demands.

Read more of my article in Wealth Manager.