this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
154 points (98.7% liked)

Canada

7203 readers
268 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Universities


πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

AKA "surprisingly, oligopolies are there to make money and care about their customers just enough not to pee on their faces while someone else is looking".

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm lucky to have a lot of savings. I regularly get calls and emails from Scotiabank telling me to buy mutual funds and increase my credit limit. I always figured that if someone contacts you saying they have an offer that will make you a lot of money, they're lying. CBC seems to confirm that.

[–] greybeard@lemmy.one 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you have a notable amount in savings, investing it in some way is generally a good idea, but I agree with not trusting your bank to steer you right.

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I do. It's in GICs at 5.25% interest. The bank wants me to switch it to mutual funds with a 2% management fee.

[–] blindsight@beehaw.org 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

All-equity mutual funds net fees will, on average, return more than 5ΒΌ%. (Should be about 7-8% on average). That said, that comes with a lot of volatility (value fluctuations) and you can expect sometime in the next 50 years to have a year that's down as much as 50%, but over the same 50 years it will outperform any GIC.

They're still a terrible product, though. An ETF will do the same, but be worth about 3-4Γ— as much after 50 years due to mutual fund fees eating most of the compound gains.

Anyway, the ethics of mutual funds are why I quit the finance industry before even really getting started in it. I did financial analytics as a co-op student for one of the major banks in the mutual funds group and had the skills and connections to make a career in finance, but I couldn't stomach making a career working on financial products that are predatory.