System for cheaper managed funds?

You don't need to invest the 100. Most funds will make their portfolio public. If you can't find every investment in a fund, you should be able to find the major investments on the internet without too much trouble. Funds must disclose this information in their annual reports too.

It is quite possible that your dealing costs could be higher than the management fee because of the savings made by funds dealing in large amounts. A fund, for example, might reduce its percent invested in one stock from 6% to 5% of the fund while it would not be economical for you to do the same.

_________

If you go to a fund manager's website, and then look for the key features of a fund, you will usually find the top 10 or top 20 shareholdings. Once upon a time you used to get a complete list in the annual report booklet, but no longer in most cases.

However, because of the limitations effectively imposed by the free market float of shares and the difficulty of making major changes to holdings, you will often find that the top 10 are found in the top 20 FTSE100 companies. The equity income funds will choose some preferentially, while general managed funds will probably mirror the index fairly closely, being closet trackers.

If you build your own portfolio, you may well tend to have equal weightings of the shares held at first. In this you will differ from most funds, and your portfolio may out-perform or under-perform the index as a result. The odds are that you will out-perform it in a falling market. Your portfolio may also exhibit contrarian tendencies, depending on your share selection.

Set up a dummy portfolio on one of the financial websites like

Trustnet gives top 20 holdings for many trusts.

Thanks. The III one looks good. Not so sure about the thisismoney one - it put some stuff in my portfolio and i can't delete it. The Ample one is much easier to use!

It should be easy in the This is Money portfolio. You just click on "edit" and then on "Delete Stock".

However I prefer the iii/Ample one myself, particularly for the charting, which is quite adaptable as long as there are no odd spikes in the data. They seem to be prone to that for some reason.

How up-to-date are they?

Neil

Dunno - see for yourself

In message , Alex writes

You would, of course, be acting on historical information. Some fund will buy and sell a share a number of times within the period covered by the periodic published information.

It was a rhetorical question.

Since you didn't make that clear, it could equally be read as a non rhetorical question.