Insight May 2015

In recent years, there has been a continued shift away from load options with one-time, upfront sales commission payments, such as the back-end load (deferred sales charge or DSC) option. The back-end loads are increasingly giving way to load-waived front-end load sales and no load funds. The changes in the usage of the various load options are reverberating through the advisor compensation formulas in the intermediated advice distribution channels. The May issue of Insight examines these trends and documents the asset growth of different load options, redemption, gross sales, net flows and includes company sales rankings for each load option. The Trendlines piece looks into the growth of mutual funds in tax-free savings accounts (TFSAs) and assets by distribution channel.