Date: 5th February 2016
Author: BETTER FINANCE

On February 2nd ESMA released some long awaited results of its investigation on falsely active equity UCITS funds (also called “closet indexers”). Those are funds that claim to be “actively” managed but that are in fact merely following market indices, although they charge much higher fees than low cost index-tracking funds such as ETFs. The distribution of such funds as “active” funds is very misleading to the investor and causes detriment because the investor is paying for a service that he is not actually receiving.