Investing - now you are entitled to know the costs

After years of delays, as of January 1, 2026,  firms will begin collecting data on all embedded investment costs for investment funds and segregated funds. Dealers will be required to include those costs in their annual client statement reports, beginning in 2027.

The reporting will feature disclosure of the embedded costs of owning funds, including management expense ratios (MERs), trading expense ratios (TERs) and fund expense ratios, which are the sum of MERs and TERs, in both dollar and percentage terms.

TCR is intended to provide investors with greater fee transparency.  

The biggest question is: why was full fee transparency not provided by your financial advisor before?  How can you trust a financial advisor if they failed to disclose and explain the compounding drag on your future that fees impose. Shouldn't this have been a central topic of each meeting from the first meeting that you had through to your most recent meeting?

Why has industry fought to keep this key information from investors and insureds until now?

Costs are the single biggest factor impacting your long term returns that is controllable.  Sound financial advice is not about the advisor's fancy meals (holiday and birthday lunches), sporting events etc, fancy offices. Sound financial advice is a function of big data - empirical evidence - absence of bias of restricted licensing - conflicts of interests such as goosed fees for sales of exempt products and permanent life insurance etc.

Stock pickers and strategy theorists are no better then throwing darts at a board.  They promote gambling dressed up like a science or an art -not much different then a shell game at a carnival.

Better to control what you can - costs.  But first, you need to know the costs.  

Ask yourself, did my advisor disclose all these costs before January 1?  If not, whose interests are they putting first?  I suggest that they were hiding what they didn't want you to know. Because if you knew, any informed or sophisticated investor would not put up with hidden costs or the high costs of many of the bank-associated dealers, exempt market gambling and/or life insurance "investment" products.

The above are my comments, not legal advice, and only suggested by (not a summary of)  With CRM3 around the corner, here’s how financial services firms are preparing | Advisor.ca

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