Walk into almost any conversation about fund investing and you will hear the same shorthand: ETFs are cheaper than mutual funds.
It is a tidy rule of thumb, repeated so often it has hardened into received wisdom
Shelley Antoniewicz, a longtime economist who tracks fund industry data, says that shorthand quietly misleads investors who treat it as a substitute for actually reading a prospectus. Quick Read – Shelley Antoniewicz argues that fund structure matters far less than scale, noting equity mutual fund fees dropped 60% from 99 basis points in 2000 to 40 basis points today. – Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and iShares Core US Aggregate Bond ETF didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.
Speaking on The Rational Reminder Podcast episode “Economist: The State of Investing in 2026,” Antoniewicz argued that the structure of a fund matters far less than its scale. The headline number she keeps coming back to: on an asset-weighted basis, equity mutual fund investors paid 99 basis points for an equity mutual fund in 2000, compared to just 40 basis points today, a 60% decline. That compression is the real story of the last 25 years, and it has happened inside both wrappers.