Do Chinese Investors Get What They Don't Pay For? Expense Ratios, Loads, and The Returns to China's Open-End Mutual Funds

In this paper we analyze the performance of China's open-end mutual funds by different approaches. Using the data of 467 open-end mutual funds from 60 fund families from Jan 2010 to Apr 2015, we find that the performance of most mutual funds does not beat the collection of indexes that most closely track the fund, and the fund families with high expense ratios serve investors less well than those with low expense ratios. Investors would earn higher returns by investing in mutual funds with low expenses and low front end loads.