Why would a mutual fund plummet on the same day it pays its annual distribution & capital gains? [duplicate]
The price of a share of a mutual fund is its Net Asset Value (nav). Before the payout of dividends and capital gain distribution, the fund was holding both stock shares and cash that resulted from dividends and capital gains. After the payout, a share only holds the stock. Therefore once the cash is paid out the NAV must drop by the same amount as was paid out per share. Thus of course assumes no other activity or valuation changes of the underlying assets. Regular market activity will obscure what the payout does to the NAV.
"A huge amount of money in all financial markets is from institutional investors, such as mutual funds, government pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, etc.  For various reasons these funds do all of their trading at the end of the day.  They care primarily that their end-of-day balances are in line with their targets and are easy to audit and far less about ""timing the market"" for the best possible trades. So, if you're looking at a stock that is owned by many institutional investors -- such as a stock (like AAPL) that makes up a significant portion of an index that many funds track -- there will be a huge amount of activity at this time relative to stocks that are less popular among institutions. Even just in its introduction this paper (PDF) gives a fair overview of other reasons why there's a lot of trading at end-of-day in general. (In fact, because of all this closing activity and the reliance on end-of-day prices as signposts for financial calculations, the end-of-day has for decades been the single most fraud-ridden time of the trading day.  Electronic trading has done away with a lot of the straight-up thievery that floor traders and brokers used to get away with at the expense of the public, but it still exists.  See, for example, any explanation of the term banging the close, or the penalties against 6 banks just last month for manipulating the FX market at the close.)" "How on earth can you possibly know what is going on in individual company X?  The sole exception is if it is your own company. The stock markets of the world are in fact a nest of sharks.  The big sharks essentially make money out of the little sharks.  Some little sharks manage not to be eaten, and grow bigger.  Good luck with that. ""Insider trading"" is, when found out, a crime these days.  But ""insider knowledge"", ""insider hints"", ""knowledge of market sentiment"" and indeed just rumours about a given company are the kinds of things you won't particularly get to hear of in the fog of disinformation, and don't particularly want to waste your time with for a very uncertain loss or gain at the end of the year. The thing I find annoying about mutual funds is that they can be very stupid, and I speculate that it may be the consequence of the marketing on the one hand, and the commission structure on the other.  I started cashing in my funds in late 2007, following the collapse of Northern Rock here in the UK.  The ""2008"" crisis was in fact the slowest economic car crash in history. But very very few mutual funds saw, or seemed to see, the way the wind was blowing, and switch massively to cash. If the punters had the courage to hang on, of course, mostly stocks bounced back in 2009 and 2010.  Moral: remember you can cash your stuff in any time you want." It is very likely that the fund paid out a dividend in the form of reinvested shares.  This happens with many funds, especially as we come to the end of the year. Here's a simplified example of how it works.  Assume you invested $1000 and bought 100 units at $10/unit.  Ignoring the daily price fluctuations, if the fund paid out a 20% dividend, you would get $200 and the unit price would drop to $8/unit.  Assuming you chose to reinvest your dividends, you would automatically purchase another $200 worth of units at the new price (so 25 more units).  You would now have 125 units @ $8/unit = $1000 invested. In your example, notice that you now have more shares than you originally purchased, but that the price dropped significantly.  Your market value is above what you originally invested, so there was probably also a bit of a price increase for the day.  You should see the dividend transaction listed somewhere in your account. Just to confirm, I did a quick search on ICENX and found that they did indeed pay a dividend yesterday. There are very strict regulations that requires the assets which a fund buys on behalf of its investors to be kept completely separate from the fund's own assets (which it uses to pay its expenses), except for the published fees. Funds are typically audited regularly to ensure this is the case. So the only way in which a default of the fund could cause a loss of invstor money would be if the fund managers broke the regulations and committed various crimes. I've never heard of this actually happening to a normal mutual fund. There is of course also a default risk when a fund buys bonds or other non-equity securities, and this may sometimes be non-obvious. For example, some ETFs which are nominally based on a stock index don't actually buy stocks; instead they buy or sell options on those stocks, which involves a counterparty risk. The ETF may or may not have rules that limit the exposure to any one counterparty. "Usually there are annual or semi-annual reports for a mutual fund that may give an idea for when a fund will have ""distributions"" which can cause the NAV to fall as this is when the fund passes the taxable liabilities to shareholders in the form of a dividend. Alternatively, the prospectus of the fund may also have the data on the recent distribution history that is likely what you want. If you don't understand why a fund would have a distribution, I highly suggest researching the legal structure of an open-end mutual fund where there more than a few rules about how taxes are handled for this case." "FSEMX has an annual expense ratio of 0.1% which is very low. What that means is that each month, the FSEMX will pay itself one-twelfth of 0.1% of  the total value of all the shares owned by the shareholders in the mutual fund.  If the fund has cash on hand from its trading activities or dividends collected from companies  whose stock is owned by FSEMX or interest on bonds owned by FSEMX, the  money comes out of that, but if there is no such pot (or the pot is not large enough), then the fund manager has the authority to sell some shares of the stocks held by FSEMX so that the employees can be paid, etc. If the total of cash generated by the trading and the dividend collection in a given year is (say) 3% of the share value of all the outstanding mutual fund,  then only 2.9% will be paid out as dividend and capital gain distribution  income to the share holders, the remaining 0.1% already having been paid to FSEMX management for operating expenses.   It is important to keep in mind that expenses are always paid even if there are no profits, or even if there are losses that year so that no dividends or capital gains distributions are made.  You don't see the expenses explicitly on any statement that you receive.  If FSEMX sells shares of stocks that it holds to pay the expenses, this reduces  the share value (NAV) of the mutual fund shares that you hold.  So, if your mutual fund account ""lost"" 20% in value that year because the market was falling, and you got no dividend or capital gains distributions either, remember that only 19.9% of that loss can be blamed on the President or Congress or Wall Street or public-sector unions or your neighbor's refusal to ditch his old PC in favor of a new Mac, and the rest (0.1%) has gone to FSEMX to pay for fees you agreed to when you bought FSEMX shares. If you invest directly in FSEMX through Fidelity's web site, there is no sales charge, and you pay no expenses other than the 0.1% annual expense ratio.  There is a fee for selling FSEMX shares after owning them only for a short time since  the fund wants to discourage short-term investors. Whatever other fees finance.yahoo.com lists might be descriptive of the uses that FSEMX puts its expense ratio income to in its internal management, but are not of any importance to the prudent investor in FSEMX who will never encounter them or have to pay them." It may be true for a bond fund.  But it is not true for bond etf.  Bond etf will drop by the same amount when it distribute dividend on ex-dividend date. "1) When it says ""an investment or mutual fund"", is a mutual fund not   an investment? If no, what is the definition of an investment? A mutual fund is indeed an investment. The article probably mentions  mutual funds separately from other investments because it is not uncommon for mutual funds to give you the option to automatically reinvest dividends and capital gains.    2) When it says ""In terms of stocks"", why does it only mention   distribution of dividends but not distribution of capital gains? Since distributions are received as cash deposits they can be used to buy more of the stock. Capital gains, on the other hand, occur when an asset increases in value. These gains are realized when the asset is sold. In the case of stocks, reinvestment of capital gains doesn't make much sense since buying more stock after selling it to realize capital gains results in you owning as much stock as you had before you realized the gains. 3) When it says ""In terms of mutual funds"", it says about ""the   reinvestment of distributions and dividends"". Does ""distributions"" not   include distributions of ""dividends""? why does it mention   ""distributions"" parallel to ""dividends""? Used in this setting, dividend and distribution are synonymous, which is highlighted by the way they are used in parallel. 4) Does reinvestment only apply to interest or dividends, but not to   capital gain? Reinvestment only applies to dividends in the case of stocks. Mutual funds must distribute capital gains to shareholders, making these distributions essentially cash dividends, usually as a special end of year distribution. If you've requested automatic reinvestment, the fund will buy more shares with these capital gain distributions as well." Dividends from mutual funds reduce the share value the day they are distributed.   Mutual funds do this at least once a year, or more times in the year if there are a lot of gains, to pass through taxable gains to individuals who may have lower tax rates or deferred tax accounts such as you. This is meaningful for investors who hold the mutual funds in taxable accounts,  but immaterial for 401ks.  Your account balance is not affected if you don't get the distribution before roll over. "In an attempt to express this complicated fact in lay terms I shall focus exclusively on the most influential factor effecting the seemingly bizarre outcome you have noted, where the price chart of VIX ETFs indicates upwards of a 99% decrease since inception. Other factors include transaction costs and management fees.  Some VIX ETFs also provide leveraged returns, describing themselves as ""two times VIX"" or ""three times VIX"", etc. Regarding the claim that volatility averages out over time, this is supported by your own chart of the spot VIX index. EDIT It should be noted that (almost) nobody holds VIX ETFs for anything more than a day or two.  This will miminise the effects described above.  Typical daily volumes of VIX ETFs are in excess of 100% of shares outstanding.  In very volatile markets, daily volumes will often exceed 400% of shares outstanding indicating an overwhelming amount of day trading." "If you're talking about a single stock, you greatly underestimate the chances of it dropping, even long-term. Check out the 12 companies that made up the first Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. There is probably only one you've heard of: GE. Many of the others are long gone or have since been bought up by larger companies. And remember these were 12 companies that were deemed to be the most representative of the stock market around the turn of the 20th century. Now, if you're talking about funds that hold many stocks (up to thousands), then your question is a little different. Over the long-term (25+ years), we have never experienced a period where the overall market lost value. Of course, as you recognize, the psychology of investors is a very important factor. If the stock market loses half of its value in a year (as it has done a few times), people will be inundated with bad news and proclamations of ""this time it's different!"" and explanations of why the stock market will never recover. Perhaps this may be true some day, but it never has been thus far. So based on all the evidence we have, if you hold a well-diversified fund, the chances of it going down long-term (again, meaning 25+ years) are basically zero." Look at their dividend history.  The chart there is simply reporting the most recent dividend (or a recent time period, in any event).  GF for example: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/gf/dividend-history It's had basically two significant dividends and a bunch of small dividends.  Past performance is not indicative of future returns and all that.  It might never have a similar dividend again. What you're basically looking at with that chart is a list of recently well-performing funds - funds who had a good year.  They obviously may or may not have such a good year next year. You also have funds that are dividend-heavy (intended explicitly to return significant dividends).  Those may return large dividends, but could still fall in value significantly.  Look at ACP for example: it's currently trading near it's 2-year low.  You got a nice dividend, but the price dropped quite a bit, so you lost a chunk of that money.  (I don't know if ACP is a dividend-heavy fund, but it looks like it might be.) GF's chart is also indicative of something interesting: it fell off a cliff right after it gave its dividend (at the end of the year).  Dropped $4.  I think that's because this is a mutual fund priced based on the NAV of its holdings - so it dividended some of those holdings, which dropped the share price (and the NAV of the fund) by that amount.  IE, $18 a share, $4 a share dividend, so after that $14 a share.  (The rest of the dividends are from stock holdings which pay dividends themselves, if I understand properly).  Has a similar drop in Dec 2013.  They may simply be trying to keep the price of the fund in the ~$15 a share range; I suspect (but don't know) that some funds have in their charter a requirement to stay in a particular range and dividend excess value. "There is no fundamental, good reason, I think; ""that's just how it's done"" (which is what all the other answers seem to be saying, w/o coming out and admitting it). Just guessing, but I'll bet most of the reason is historical: Before up-to-the-moment quotes were readily available, that was a bit tedious to calculate/update the fund's value, so enacted-laws let it be done just once per day.  (@NL7 quotes the security act of 1940, which certainly has been updated, but also still might contain the results of crufty rationales, like this.) There are genuinely different issues between funds and stocks, though: One share of a fund is fundamentally different from one share of stock: There is a finite supply of Company-X-stock, and people are trading that piece of ownership around, and barter to find an mutually-agreeable-price.  But when you buy into a mutual-fund, the mutual-fund ""suddenly has more shares"" -- it takes your money and uses it to buy shares of the underlying stocks (in a ratio equal to its current holdings).  As a consequence: the mutual fund's price isn't determined by two people bartering and agreeing on a price (like stock); there is exactly one sane way to price a mutual fund, and that's the weighted total of its underlying stock.  If you wanted to sell your ownership-of-Mutual-Fund-Z to a friend at 2:34pm, there wouldn't be any bartering, you'd just calculate the value based on the stated-value of the underlying stock at that exact moment. So: there's no inherent reason you can't instantaneously price a mutual fund.  BUT people don't really buy/sell funds to each other -- they go to the fund-manager and essentially make a deposit-or-withdraw.  The fund-manager is only required by law to do it once a day (and perhaps even forbidden from doing it more often?), so that's all they do. [Disclaimer: I know very little about markets and finance. But I recognize answers that are 'just because'.]" Dividends are not paid immediately upon reception from the companies owned by an ETF. In the case of SPY, they have been paid inconsistently but now presumably quarterly. Interesting, but I don't think we are talking the same thing. This seems to say that that the fund itself doesn't have the rule applied: I.E. the MF can't get hit with the 5% commission when you buy it.  That makes sense.  What I'm asking though is that when my (say) American Fund that I own already does a rebalance, the constituent holdings change. Those securities are not exempt from the rule and thus when they are transacted can have commissions applied.  As a matter of fact the broker for those securities has no idea if the fund is eligible or not.   Where did you get this from? As I'm. It studying for a series 7 I'm probably missing some foundational sources.