Theres nothing to see here. Please move on.

“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

William Wordsworth

I’ve been there. I’ve suffered from the siren song of a chart pornist who wants to show you beautiful charts that somehow convince you that paying a 5.9% front load on a mutual fund ensures that, somehow, some way, the mutual fund is going to outperform the market. “We’ll have money when the market tanks,” the chart pornist sings his siren song. “so we can buy even more when everyone else is running away!”

In theory, this approach would work if a) it was impossible to value cost average. b) NOBODY else did it, and c) the loads weren’t so high that they didn’t cripple your investment ability, giving everyone else such an enormous head start that it’d take a ton of down days followed by a record-setting up day before that strategy could work.

However, up until now, I’d struggled to find any hard data to support my gut feeling that paying a mutual fund load and disproportionately high fees was akin to lighting your money on fire.

Before I dig into the results, let me take a moment to remind everyone what a mutual fund load is and how you can find these loads.

First, let’s answer the initial question:

What is a mutual fund load?

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A mutual fund load is a pretty name for a salesman’s commission. It is simply money going from your pocket to a salesman’s pocket for introducing you to the wonderful wallet-gouging world of loaded mutual funds. Back a zillion years ago when you couldn’t invest in stocks or mutual funds yourself and needed to call up a broker, who would help guide you through the minefield of investing, paying a small fee for someone’s services was reasonable. Nowadays, it’s not reasonable. I’ll explain more why in a minute, when we see the data, but let me implant something perfectly and crystal clear in your mind.

There is no reason in the world for you to pay a mutual fund load. None. Fin. Period. End of story. If someone tells you that you should pay a load, it is because he wants a piece of your money without earning it.

Now that we’ve established the true intent behind mutual fund loads, let’s look at:

What Are the Three Types of Mutual Fund Loads?

There are three versions of evil mutual fund loads.

1. Class A, front-loaded mutual funds. A Class A fund means that you’re paying the commission right when you make the purchase. If a mutual fund front load is 5.9%, and you’re investing $1,000, then you’re going to invest $941 in the actual fund’s shares and you’re going to give your salesperson $59 to reward him for steering you down this path to doom.
2. Class B, back-loaded, contingent deferred sales load (CDSL), or contingent deferred sales charge (CDSC) funds. This one is, in my opinion, the most deceptive of the loads. You pay a fee if you leave the fund within a certain time. The fee which you pay usually decreases over time, starting out at 5% if you sell within a year, and decreasing 1% each year until you could leave “scot free” after the 5th year. There’s one small problem. You won’t leave scot free. What these funds do is increase the 12b-1 fee to 1% each year so you wind up paying anyway. We’ll explain that next.
3. Class C, level load. This is a fund which charges higher than a 0.25% 12b-1 fee. The 12b-1 fee is for operating and marketing expenses. If a mutual fund has a 12b-1 fee of higher than .25%, then it is not allowed by the SEC to call itself a “no load” fund. The statutory limit for a 12b-1 fee is 1%, so guess what loaded mutual funds are going to charge? Yes, you win a kewpie doll. They’re going to charge 1%. Remember when I showed you that financial planners who charged you 1% of your assets under management were slowly, surreptitiously siphoning away your money and charging you for what was almost assuredly underperformance in your investments? A 1% 12b-1 fee accomplishes the same thing.

As I have said before, all of these load fees would be fine if you were paying for performance which far exceeded the costs involved. The problem, as the Israelsen study points out, is that you’re not getting superior performance.

No-load funds outperformed loaded funds in all nine of Morningstar’s mutual fund categories. The “best” load fund performance class was in mid-cap value mutual funds, where no-load funds outperformed load funds by only .1%. The worst was in small cap growth mutual funds, where no-load funds outperformed load funds by 4.3%.

If you hold these funds outside of tax-deferred or tax-free retirement accounts, then you may see slightly better performance due to capital gains; however, loaded funds still underperform in ALL NINE categories. The “best” performer is mid-cap value mutual funds, but those loaded funds still underperform by .1%; the worst performer is still small cap growth, with an underperformance of 3.4%.

To compound the problem, the loaded mutual funds are actively managed funds. Actively managed funds underperform their index fund brethren across the board. Once we remove the survivorship bias from numbers and include funds which closed, underperformance ranged from 3.56% underperformance for large value stocks to 5.9% underperformance for mid blend stock funds .

Combine the actively managed fund underperformance numbers and the load drag, and you get a very ugly picture.

Total Underperformance