Fund Vehicles

Helps you compare mutual funds, ETFs, index funds, and SMAs when users ask about costs, tax efficiency, or which fund to buy. Covers the mechanics that actually matter: how ETF creation/redemption avoids capital gains, why expense ratios compound into serious money over decades, and the difference between tracking error and tracking difference. Includes worked examples showing a 0.72% fee difference destroying $160k over 30 years on a $100k investment. Use this when someone asks about Vanguard vs Fidelity, load fees, or whether an ETF is worth it over a mutual fund. The tax efficiency section is solid, breaks down exactly why ETFs defer gains while mutual funds distribute them to all shareholders.

skills.sh installs: 737
GitHub stars: 224
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add joellewis/finance_skills --skill fund-vehicles --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Fund Vehicles

Core Concepts

Vehicle Comparison: Decision-Relevant Differences

Trading: ETFs trade intraday at market prices that can deviate from NAV (premiums/discounts, especially in volatile markets or for illiquid underlying assets); mutual funds transact once daily at NAV.
Tax efficiency: ETFs generally distribute far fewer capital gains than mutual funds (mechanism below); SMAs allow lot-level tax-loss harvesting that pooled vehicles cannot.
Customization: SMAs hold individual securities directly, so investors can exclude stocks/sectors and harvest specific lots; minimums are typically $100K-$1M+ with fees above index ETFs.
Cost: broad index ETFs and index mutual funds cost as little as 0.01-0.05%; active mutual funds commonly cost 0.50-1.00%+ before any loads.

Expense Ratios

Total annual cost as a percentage of AUM, deducted from fund returns. Includes management fees, administrative costs, and sometimes 12b-1 distribution fees. The expense ratio is the single most predictive factor of future fund performance — lower-cost funds consistently outperform higher-cost funds within the same category.

SKILL.md on GitHub