Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Mutual fund
Summary
A mutual fund is an investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV in Europe ('investment company with variable capital') and open-ended investment company (OEIC) in the UK.
Mutual funds are often classified by their principal investments: money market funds, bond or fixed income funds, stock or equity funds, or hybrid funds. Funds may also be categorized as index funds, which are passively managed funds that track the performance of an index, such as a stock market index or bond market index, or actively managed funds, which seek to outperform stock market indices but generally charge higher fees. Primary structures of mutual funds are open-end funds, closed-end funds, unit investment trusts.
Open-end funds are purchased from or sold to the issuer at the net asset value of each share as of the close of the trading day in which the order was placed, as long as the order was placed within a specified period before the close of trading. They can be traded directly with the issuer.
Mutual funds have advantages and disadvantages compared to direct investing in individual securities. The advantages of mutual funds include economies of scale, diversification, liquidity, and professional management. However, these come with mutual fund fees and expenses.
Mutual funds are regulated by governmental bodies and are required to publish information including performance, comparison of performance to benchmarks, fees charged, and securities held. A single mutual fund may have several share classes by which larger investors pay lower fees.
Hedge funds and exchange-traded funds are not mutual funds, and each is targeted at different investors, with hedge funds being available only to high net worth individuals.
At the end of 2020, open-end mutual fund assets worldwide were 23.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (13)
MGT-301: Foundations in financial economics
The aim of this course is to expose EPFL bachelor students to some of the main areas in financial economics. The course will be organized around six themes. Students will obtain both practical insight
FIN-405: Investments
The course covers a wide range of topics in investment analysis
FIN-607: Empirical Asset Pricing
This class is designed to give you an understanding of the basics of empirical asset pricing. This means that we will learn how to test asset pricing models and apply them mostly to stock markets. We