Gartenberg Standard and Mutual Fund Fees

It’s not often that the Supreme Court takes on a case with such a key personal finance subject, mutual fund fees, so when the highest court in the land made a ruling last week, I perked up. The case was Jones v. Harris Associates and it concerned Harris Associates’s Oakmark funds. Shareholders owned Oakmark funds through their employer’s plans and were charged a management fee of 0.88%, versus the 0.45% fee charged to Harris Associates’s institutional clients. The plaintiff’s argument was that they were being charged an excessive fee compared to Harris’s clients, in this case almost twice as much.

(Click to continue reading…)