We crunched the numbers. The upshot: The returns may not be worth the tax savings.
Some mutual funds may claim to be tax efficient on average, but once the higher annual fees are paid, you as an investor might be disappointed. Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News By Derek Horstmeyer Jan. 10, 2021 6:43 pm ET
Investors whose top concern is minimizing taxes often turn to “tax managed” or “tax efficient” mutual funds. But the returns they get may not be worth the tax savings.
In recent research, we found that tax-managed funds underperformed similar funds that weren’t tax managed by about 0.09 percentage point a year on average, over the 10 years ended Dec. 1, 2020. That is largely due to the higher fees the tax-managed funds carry, but in many cases their managers also performed significantly worse than their peers at the other funds.