Since their introduction, mutual funds have been a very popular investing vehicles; especially for those who do not have time, enough resources and knowledge for active trading.

Advantages of Mutual Funds

  1. Diversification: a typical mutual fund invests in 50 to 300 securities and thus has reduced overall portfolio risk. Generally, this level of diversification at individual levels needs huge amounts of money.
  2. Portfolio management: by investing in a good mutual fund, you are actually hiring some professional portfolio managers to look after your portfolio. They buy and sell stocks and make necessary portfolio adjustments for you.
  3. Easy to handle: mutual funds are relatively easy to buy and sell. They have low minimum investments like $2,500 or $5,000 and can be traded once per day at the closing net asset value of NAV.
  4. Dividend reinvestment: the income from the funds can be used to purchase more shares of the fund.

Disadvantages of Mutual Funds

  1. Not suitable for active traders: The facts that they are traded once per day as per NAV and have some sales charges make them unsuitable for active trading.
  2. High expense ratios: mutual funds typically have higher expense ratio than index funds and ETFs. More over the fees including in buying and selling them can make them less profitable.
  3. Management issues: the performance of the fund manager greatly determines the performance of the fund. Thus unnecessary trades, wrong market timings and poor replacements can affect fund performance.
  4. Taxes: the capital gains from mutual fund investments are usually subjected to taxes at individual level.

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