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Comment by angry_moose | Hacker News Reader

You can. There's usually a hefty transaction fee when purchasing a funds not managed by whichever service you're on ($49?).

Might be manageable if you're purchasing in enormous quantities; but a 5% fee on $1000 hurts if you're in normal consumer purchase ranges.

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This is true for mutual funds, but Vanguard ETFs are available on Fidelity with no fees.

And ETFs are generally more tax efficient anyways. I'm not sure what the benefit to funds are.

It used to be you could buy fractions of a mutual fund, but not ETFs. Recently, brokerages have started allowed you to do fractional ETFs as well though.

There are some minor advantages to funds left, especially in taxable. Some of the funds do their best to allocate certain costs to the ETFs so that ends up more favorable tax-wise.

The real main advantage of funds vs ETFs is they don't bounce around in price every millisecond.

Just because mutual funds are priced and traded daily doesn't mean their market value isn't still bouncing around every millisecond.

One benefit to Mutual Funds is that you can do things like reinvest dividends, or investment plans. It's not a fundamental advantage that a mutual fund has, but no brokers that I am aware of would let you do those things with an ETF. So if you have long term "forget it" account, with ETFs it will accumulate cash from dividends. And the tax benefit of ETFs doesn't really help in a tax advantaged account (e.g. retirement). Finally, theoretically at least, when you buy an ETF there is an explicit "transaction cost". Even when they don't charge you a commission, there's a bid ask spread. Mutual funds trade at NAV both ways (unless of course there's an external transaction cost separately disclosed).

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