Canadian Couch Potato

In my last post, I reviewed RBC’s forthcoming lineup of traditional ETFs, which will appear later this summer. The launch of these ETFs will also spark some changes in RBC’s index mutual funds: they’ll be getting new benchmark indexes and lower fees, and in some cases they’ll use the new ETFs as their underlying holdings. It’s good news for investors who want to use index mutual funds rather than ETFs, so let’s take a closer look.

We’ll start with the two equity funds that will see only a new benchmark, with no change to their structure.

The RBC Canadian Index Fund (RBF556) currently tracks the S&P/TSX Composite Index, but as of September it will be pegged to the FTSE Canada All Cap Domestic Index. (You can find the factsheets for all of FTSE’s indexes here.) These two indexes are very similar, so this is not a terribly meaningful change. The FTSE index is the same one tracked by the soon-to-be-launched RBC Canadian Equity Index ETF (RCAN), but the mutual fund will not use this ETF as its underlying holding—at least not yet.