Managed Funds View MF entire holdings

Not generally ... especially since the stock list would change fairly regularly.

I would also think that the exact holdings may be considered proprietary information - part of their "value add" ?

I'm sure there are some laws that state that some of this information must be made available to investors, but I'm not sure it would demand a complete and up-to-date listing of all holdings ?

 

If you have enough money available to invest directly into the wholesale version of the funds, and don't mind the extra paperwork of NOT using a wrap account - then you can save quite a lot in fees.

When I was researching wrap accounts a couple of years back, I found that the administrative fee pretty much eroded all the benefits of investing in wholesale funds - and since I'm pretty good with managing my own paperwork, I decided to go direct myself.

Personally I wouldn't bother with the wrap unless it gave you access to funds you really want to hold and couldn't if you went direct.

 

Remember that some fund managers offer a form of wrap account where you can invest through third party fund managers using the same facility. Colonial First State is probably the best known, but Perpetual and BT (amongst others) also offer similar services.

You need to watch the MERs - they still slug you, but I've found CFS to be generally pretty good there with some funds (I invest in a BT and an Ausbil fund via CFS - it was convenient, not that expensive, and my margin lender offers very good LVR on them)

 

Your financial planner will earn lots of fees from putting you in a wrap account. They will earn relatively little (or potentially nothing at all - depending on the fund manager) if you go directly into wholesale funds. Unless your financial planner charges upfront fees, they aren't likely to want to help you do the work (but I say just do it yourself anyway).

By paperwork I just mean at tax time - there's no nice consolidated report showing you where to put the numbers in your tax return. That's not a problem for me anyway - I just give the summaries from all my wholesale funds to my accountant and he punches it into his system - easy as. It's really not that big of a deal - I say go wholesale if you have enough money to do so (which you do - although it depends a bit on the funds you want to invest in).

The other nice thing about CFS is that you only need $100K minimum - but that's across all funds ... so you could actually have (for example) 4 funds @ $25K each and put them into the wholesale version of the funds ... this is exactly what my SMSF did!.