I read this article in the FT today about how new EU regulations (MiFID II) have forced asset managers (including MMM favourite Vanguard) to disclose hidden charges they hadn't previously been telling their customers about.
Fund managers are no longer allowed to provide just an ongoing costs figure (OCF), which is the industry’s standard measure of running costs. Instead, they have to give the total cost, including transaction or trading costs and other charges.
Once you include transaction costs, many investors pay almost double the OCF in the UK's most popular funds.
To take a Vanguard fund as an example, for Vanguard LS 40% Equity, the OCF is 0.22% but the transaction costs are 0.12%, bringing the total cost of ownership to 0.34%.
Were any of you aware this was the case? I wasn't.
Seems pretty dodgy to me. Is this a cause to revisit your choice of investments?