Our Investing Tools
Asset Allocator
Assists you in building a portfolio of Steadyhand funds that meet your particular needs.
Fee Calculator
Shows you the fees associated with any given portfolio of Steadyhand funds.
Fees can have a tremendous impact on your returns. A difference of 1% can seem insignificant in many aspect of life and business, but it's crucial when it comes to investment fees.
Sometimes 1% makes all the difference. A 1% difference in DNA sequence is all that separates humans from chimpanzees. Consider the average Canadian equity mutual fund, which charges an annual fee of about 2.5%. Invest $100,000 in such a fund and assume that you expect to earn a long-term return of 8% on your investment (after fees). If you knock 1% off the annual fee, after 20 years, you'd have an extra ~$95,000 in your account.
Check out the Ontario Securities Commission's Mutual Fund Fee Impact Calculator to see how fees can impact your portfolio.
There are two types of investment fees: the ones that have to be paid and the ones that don't.
Fees that you shouldn't be paying can come in many forms, including: front-end sales charges, deferred sales charges (DSCs) and transaction fees, among others. All of these types of fees can be avoided by dealing with a no-load fund company that sells funds directly to investors, like Steadyhand.
The one fee that cannot be avoided when investing in mutual funds is the management expense ratio. There are two components to an MER – the management fee and the operating expenses. The management fee is a fixed fee that is paid to the manager for investing the fund’s assets and making ongoing investment decisions. The operating expenses represent the legal, accounting, audit, and other administrative fees. The MER is an indirect fee – i.e., investors do not have to cut a cheque to the manager; rather, it is deducted from a fund’s net assets on a daily basis.
Traditionally, a fund's MER changes from year-to-year, because a fund’s operating expenses represent variable costs. Moreover, most MERs are not calculated until after a calendar year has ended. The result: investors only know in hindsight how much they paid in fees during a particular year. There must be a better way, you may imagine. There is.
We call it One Simple Fee.
Asset Allocator
Assists you in building a portfolio of Steadyhand funds that meet your particular needs.
Fee Calculator
Shows you the fees associated with any given portfolio of Steadyhand funds.