Egyptian Mutual Fund Fees Compared

What the management fee is

The management fee is what the asset manager charges each year to run the fund, quoted as a percentage of the fund’s net assets rather than of your gains. It is accrued continuously and deducted from the fund’s own assets, which means the unit price you see published has already had it taken out — you never receive a separate bill for it, and it does not appear as a line on your statement. It is also charged whether the fund rises or falls: the percentage applies to the assets under management, not to performance. That is the single most important property of a fee. A return is uncertain and is a forecast the moment anyone states it in advance; a fee is a known, contractual amount that applies every year regardless of what the market does.

What this page does not include

This is a comparison of management fees only — it is not a total cost of ownership. Egyptian funds may also apply a subscription charge when you buy, a redemption charge when you sell within a defined holding period, and administrative, custody and audit expenses borne by the fund. A small number of funds additionally charge a performance fee above a stated hurdle. We publish a figure only where the fund itself publishes one, and for those items almost no Egyptian fund does: our dataset carries a subscription or redemption charge for only a handful of funds, and no fund at all reports a consolidated total expense ratio. Showing those columns filled with zeros would state something false about a real cost, so they are left out and their absence named here instead. Treat the number in this table as the largest recurring charge you can verify, not as the whole of what the fund costs.

Why fees only compare within the same fund type

Ranking every fund in the market on one fee list would be the wrong comparison. A money market fund holds treasury bills and bank deposits and requires little research to run, so it charges near the bottom of the range. An equity fund runs company analysis, and a fund tracking gold or holding foreign assets carries custody arrangements a local fixed income fund does not. Those are different jobs, and their fees are set accordingly. A money market fund is not "cheap" because it charges less than an equity fund — it is priced for what it does. The only comparison that tells you something is between funds doing the same job, which is why each table below carries its own category median and each fund is shown as a difference from that median rather than from a market-wide average.

What a fee difference actually costs

The arithmetic is simple and worth doing before you compare anything else. A management fee of 1.5% on a holding of EGP 100,000 is EGP 1,500 a year; the same holding in a fund charging 0.5% is EGP 500. The one percentage point between them is EGP 1,000 every year, taken out whether that year was good or bad, and it keeps being taken for as long as you hold the fund. That is the entire claim this page makes about fees, and it is a statement of arithmetic rather than of outcome. It does not follow that the cheaper fund will do better — two funds in the same category can differ in strategy, in the risk they take and in what they hold, and none of that is visible in a fee. The fee tells you the certain part of the cost. Everything else about the fund still has to be read.

Where to verify a fee

The binding figure is the one in the fund’s own prospectus and its published fact sheet, not on any comparison site including this one. Fees can be revised, and a manager may apply a different rate to a specific unit class. Egyptian funds are licensed and supervised by the Financial Regulatory Authority, and the prospectus filed with it is the document that governs what you are actually charged. Ask the bank or manager distributing the fund for the current prospectus before you subscribe, and check the subscription and redemption terms in it — those are the charges this page cannot show you.