Hargreaves Lansdown - "Class H"?

TightMike

I'm looking at expanding my portfolio into the emerging markets. While browsing on Hargreaves Lansdown, I came across the tracker fund BlackRock Emerging Markets Equity Tracker Class H - Accumulation (GBP).

What does the Class H mean?

Linton

Fund Classes are effectively differently charged funds with the same underlying investments. Class A is often the original retail fund with advice and platform fees bundled in. There are now of course RDR compliant simple retail Classes. Other classes may for example only be available for large scale institutional purchasers, or possibly only allocated to favoured customers. Low charge classes will perform better than high charge classes.

So in general having chosen your desired fund you need to find the lowest charge Class your platform can provide. However some platforms provide cash discounts on some parts of the charges so it isnt always that simple.

Trustnet will tell you the prices of each class of a fund though I expect there are classes which are not publicised.

To make matters more complicated there is no standard as regards Class naming. Some funds use Class B as the RDR retail fund, others may use the names C, D, R or Z and probably many others.

AnotherJoe

If you look at the detail it will tell you what the charges on in this class and other classes.

grey_gym_sock

the class names are not standard when you compare different fund managers, but are usually standard(-ish) within the same fund management group, e.g. (in this case) blackrock.

for blackrock funds, the clean class which is (i think) most commonly found on platforms is class D, and class H is similar, but sometimes fractionally cheaper, class which appears to have been created for HL ("H" for "hargreaves"?). class H also has the advantage of being available as either income or accumulation units, whilst class D is (at least for many of blackrock's trackers) only avaiable as accumulation.

e.g. this emerging markets tracker is 0.02% cheaper with class H than with class D. (according to HL's site, or according to trustnet, class H has on-going charges of 0.23%, compared 0.25% for class D; or according to blackrock's site, it's 0.22% for class H, compared to 0.24% for class D.)

in other cases (e.g. continental european equity tracker), class D and class H cost the same (e.g. 0.10%). however, class D isn't available as income units.

i don't know if any platforms other than HL have any blackrock class H. but they may in the future.

dunstonh

i don't know if any platforms other than HL have any blackrock class H. but they may in the future.

Old Mutual have had class H for about 4 years now. I have seen them on several others too.

george4064

I would go check on the BlackRock website which should contain the specific information (charges etc) for each share class.

Here: https://www.blackrock.com/uk/individual/products/260986/blackrock-emerging-markets-equity-tracker-fund-class-h-acc-fund

grey_gym_sock

dunstonh wrote: »

Old Mutual have had class H for about 4 years now.

ah, that's earlier than HL. so my speculation that "H" stands for "hargreaves" is probably nonsense

dunstonh

Actually, a bit more digging, Old Mutual got it in early in 2014. Prior to that they used the class L with rebates to give an equivalent net charge to class H.