Baxter & Associates, Inc.

Mutual funds are generally bought directly from investment companies instead of from other investors on an exchange. More employers now offer access to them as part of their retirement packages along with mutual funds, and retail investors trade them with increasing regularity.

Mutual Funds have varying operating expenses. Mutual funds are either open-ended, with no limit on the number of shares that can be sold, or closed-end, with a fixed number of shares. Easy diversification, as each fund owns small pieces of many investments. For example, suppose you want to invest $5,000 in an ETF at a final price of $45 a share.

ETFs trade like stocks and are listed on stock exchanges and sold by broker-dealers. Mutual funds enable investors to purchase shares of stocks or other securities (such as bonds) in a pool with other investors. Some specialized or niche” exchange-traded funds can be subject to additional market risks.

Unlike ETFs, they don't have trading commissions, but they do carry an expense ratio and potentially other sales fees (or loads”). 47 The most common way to construct leveraged ETFs is by trading futures contracts. Index funds and ETFs, however, have few internal trades and typically incur fewer capital gains taxes.

There are some differences between how mutual funds and ETFs calculate this figure, but, generally, NAV comes from a calculation of the total value of all the securities in the fund portfolio, any liabilities of the fund and the number of fund shares outstanding.

Also, if you plan to actively trade the assets in your account, or if you plan to make incremental additions to your ETF holdings, remember that multiple trades can mean multiple transaction costs. It does not address other types of exchange-traded products that are not registered under the 1940 Act, such as exchange-traded commodity funds or exchange-traded notes.

Unlike mutual funds, however, ETF shares are traded on a national stock exchange and at market prices that may or may not be the same as the net asset value (NAV”) of the shares, that is, the value of the ETF's assets minus its liabilities divided by the number of shares outstanding.

While there are some actively managed ETFs, these tend to have higher prices. ETF investors may also have to pay a brokerage commission on each transaction, though some ETF providers offer no-commission ETFs. From the perspective of passive investors, below is a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of ETFs.

Mutual funds are more likely to be actively managed: Most ETFS are index funds, which track market indexes. But because ETFs are traded like stocks, you typically pay a commission to buy and sell them. ETC can also refer to exchange-traded notes , which are not exchange-traded funds.

However, if you have an ETF vs. mutual fund dilemma, consider the disadvantages of mutual funds, and then consider the advantages ETFs bring to the table. More specifically, the market price represents the most recent price someone paid for that ETF. The tax advantages of ETFs are of no relevance for investors using tax-deferred accounts (or indeed, mutual funds investors who are tax-exempt in the first place).