Share Class

I was wondering if someone could explain what has happened here. My

401k plan at work has changed one of our investment options. From reading the letter they sent out, I took it that they were going to be changing the share class of the investment. I thought that meant basically there would be a change in the way the fees were collected. Maybe I was mistaken.

We did have the Julius Baer International Equity II - I mutual fund available (JETIX). We no longer have that and instead have something called Julius Baer International Equity II. JETIX had been trading at around $17 a share, while this one trades at about $115. Obviously this is a bigger change than what I expected, but what disturbs me most is there is no ticker symbol available for the new fund. So how do I look up how it's doing? Does anyone understand exactly what the change was here? Are the two funds related, or even the same somehow, but different?

Reply to
iarwain
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You need to ask questions through your company's 401(k) administrators. The people at your company who interface with the plan administrator have a legal obligation to provide a sufficient explanation about changes like this. I can guess, that they shifted to a privately managed mirror fund, i.e. similar objectives and perhaps the same exact mix, but managed just for your company 401(k) plan. Many 401(k) offerings are not of a publicly traded fund and cannot be looked up via ticker.

JOE

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Reply to
joetaxpayer

Just a friendly suggestion: Try googling. No guarantees, but the following may shed a little light on the situation:

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"iarwain" wrote

Reply to
Elle

Joe is right. It is appalling that so many people are driven to public discussions to try to understand things that employers are obligated to fully explain. It is very possible that the new fund is a non-retail offering without a ticker symbol. In that case the 401K administrators should certainly have 24-7 realtime access to the fund value together with fund description information. It is also possible for employees to not be aware of where their fund information is located.

Note that in many cases special institutional funds are lower cost and definitely to the benefit of the investors -- or not.

Reply to
redmonds

Thanks for the responses. I was able to find out that the managers of the fund are the same as the previous fund, so I'm taking that as a positive sign. I still can't say I understand exactly what is going on, but at least I'm satisfied that it has good management, so I'm going to hold on to it for now at least. Perhaps it is some sort of fund managed privately for a certain number of companies, as joetaxpayer suggested. I can't think of a better explanation.

As I said before, the letter we received said basically this would be the same fund in a different share class. Maybe it's the same/similar mix, just bigger chunks of it, since the price per share is so much higher?

Reply to
iarwain

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