Investors
urged to shoot down fee hike
Have you
ever received a voting proxy regarding your mutual fund’s annual meeting, and the
issues to be voted upon? If you have, I’d bet that most of you simply filed it
under ‘B’ for “blue box” or sent it on a trip through your paper shredder. If
you hold Dynamic Mutual funds, you will be getting a voting package – and it’s
one that deserves your attention. Instead of tossing it, I am urging you to
exercise your voting rights. Sure, most issues that require a vote are very
standard. However, on June 21, 2002 Dynamic unitholders will be asked to vote
on an issue that directly affects their bottom lines.
Dynamic Mutual Funds recently announced (http://www.dynamic.ca/Dynamic/pdfs/May13PressRelease.pdf) that unitholders will vote on June 21, 2002 on a proposed fee change to some of its funds that currently charge performance fees. In summary, Dynamic is proposing to:
Ÿ
reduce the
maximum performance fee by 0.25% and 0.15% on a selected
list of trust and corporate class funds, respectively; and
Ÿ
increase the
maximum MER by the same amount on the same funds.
Dynamic charges performance fees on its Power family of funds and many of its specialty offerings. Performance fees on Dynamic funds, if applicable, are capped at 3 per cent per year, and are calculated as:
10% x (Fund Calendar Return % - Index Calendar Return %) x (average month-end assets)
The
performance fee can add as much as 2.25 to 3 per cent annually onto base
management expense ratios (MERs), depending on the fund. To put this in perspective,
a fund would have to outperform its index by 22.5 to 30 percentage points in a
year in order to hit the performance fee cap. In other words, if the TSE 300
returns 10 per cent in a year, the Dynamic Power Canadian Growth fund would
have to earn at least 40 per cent that year, net of its MER, for it to earn a
performance fee of 3 per cent.
Such
outperformance levels by a stock fund – not to mention a bond or balanced fund
– are quite rare and not likely to be attained with any regularity. Since the
maximum performance fee isn’t likely to be reached anyway, reducing the ceiling
will probably go unnoticed.
(It is
important, however, to give credit where it’s due. The manner in which
Dynamic’s performance fee is calculated is very fair. The fee is cumulative,
which means that if the fund trailed its benchmark index in a given year, it
must make up that shortfall before accruing any performance fee. Also, no
performance fee is payable in a year where both the fund and its index lose
money. This is in sharp contrast to performance fees of many other funds, which
will charge a performance fee in a negative year, as long as the fund loses
less than the index.)
Hence, it
is my opinion that affected Dynamic unitholders will not realize any meaningful
savings, if any at all, resulting from the reduction of the performance fee
cap.
A MER cap
is only meaningful when a fund is not paying all of its own costs. In other
words, sometimes a fund sponsor (like Dynamic) will absorb some of its funds’
operating costs. They do so at their discretion and can stop any time. However,
in so doing, some firms also write into their fund’s prospectus that the MER
will not rise above a specified cap. This is what Dynamic has done, which is
why they now must ask unitholders to vote to lift the cap.
The amount of fees waived/absorbed by Dynamic on the Power funds, according to data contained in the December 31, 2001 semi-annual reports are as follows (expressed as an annual percentage of average daily fund assets):
Dynamic Power Canadian Growth - 0.35%
Dynamic Power American Growth - 0.24%
Dynamic Power Bond - 0.48%
Dynamic Power Balanced - 0.34%
In dollars, Dynamic picked up the tab on nearly $1.5 million for unitholders of the above funds during the second half of last year.
Since the Power funds (and likely many of the other affected funds) actually incurred expenses higher than the maximum MER, it seems reasonable to conclude that raising the MER cap will surely result in higher fees over the next year.
To sum this up, Dynamic’s proposed decrease in the maximum performance fee results in little or no benefit. On the other hand, lifting those same funds’ MER caps will probably result in an immediate fee hike.
It should be crystal clear at this point that the proposal that Dynamic is putting forward basically amounts to a fee increase for most (and perhaps all) of the funds mentioned in the press release.
In my view, the reduction of the maximum performance fee is nothing more than a token gesture aimed at reducing the negative connotation of an otherwise outright increase in fees.
The last
time Dynamic tabled a similar proposal was back in the fall of 2000. Actually,
I wrote about that proposal (http://www.sterlingmutuals.com/Telus_UnitholderVote_20oct2000.htm)
in this space, but the fund merger and associated fee increase was passed.
Don’t let
history repeat itself. Exercise your unitholder rights. It is in the collective
best interests of affected Dynamic unitholders to shoot down this proposal.
After all, it is your money.
Dan Hallett, B.Comm., CFP, CFA is the Senior Investment
Analyst with Sterling Mutuals Inc. He can be reached at dhallett@sterlingmutuals.com Sterling Mutuals Inc. is registered as a
mutual fund dealer in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba.