Fund Classes

Linton

Is there any information available on what the various fund classes mean?

For example, from SIPPdeal I can get Invesco Perpetual Global Smaller Companies as the standard retail version with a 1.72% charge, the No Trail version with a 1.22% charge and a Z version with a 0.97% charge. The standard versus the No Trail is clear - its a choice between a fixed or % charge to SIPPdeal. What about the Z class? Is there any downside to going for that? I cant find anything about this in the fund data sheets

To add to the confusion different fund managers use different names for their classes. "I" is a common one.

dunstonh

Different fund houses use different letters for their share classes. For example, some use class A or R for retail. Yet another fund house uses R for their clean share class. Class Z is used by some for clean pricing (inv perp for example). Class I often indicates an institutional class (but again other letters can exist for that). These are for large scale investors (typically £1 mill plus)

Clean share prices include no pricing for adviser or platform/distributor.
No trail includes no remuneration to the adviser but still pays the platform/distributor a commission
retail pays the platform and the adviser a commission.


An unbundled platform (as all will be soon but some are still to move to) will rebate the commissions on retail funds but charge explicitly. So, sometimes using a retail fund with rebates can be cheaper than using clean.