When you sell a mutual fund on eTrade, when does it actually get sold?

[cjchaps]

I know stocks on etrade are supposed to be sold rather quickly, within a few minutes. Bet what about mutual funds?
If you buy it during trading hours, when is it bought?
if you buy it after trading hours, when is it bought?
If you sell it during trading hours, when is it sold?
If you sell it after trading hours, when is it sold?

-Thanks

 

[DaveSimmons]

At Schwab, mutual fund purchases are at the end-of-day closing price if you put in your order before the cutoff time, otherwise the end of the next day. I assume sales are the same.

Mutual funds are not at all oriented towards timing, if you want to time a collection of stocks you need to trade QQQ (nasdaq) or SPDR (S&P 500) "stocks."

 

[cjchaps]

I've been trading in index mutual funds and reverse index funds, and it's been working out pretty good for me, that is why I was wondering.

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
At Schwab, mutual fund purchases are at the end-of-day closing price if you put in your order before the cutoff time, otherwise the end of the next day. I assume sales are the same.

Mutual funds are not at all oriented towards timing, if you want to time a collection of stocks you need to trade QQQ (nasdaq) or SPDR (S&P 500) "stocks."

 

[GasX]

you are trading index funds and you don't know how they work?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Also, if you've only been fantasy trading up until now, most/all mutual funds have heavy penalties if you sell them less than 6 months after purchase. Not true of QQQ and SPDR since they're set up as stocks.

 

[Hector13]

Originally posted by: Mwilding
you are trading index funds and you don't know how they work?

I hope you also know how leveraging works as most "reverse" funds are leveraged...

In any case, most open-ended mutual funds are "traded" once a day (typically at the closing price). These shares are not really traded; rather the fund itself will issue and redeem shares to new investors or those who are getting out of the fund. Thus, if you sell 100 shares of your fund and no one else does anything with their shares, the fund (in most cases) will redeem these shares for their NAV (net asset value). The end result is that there will be 100 shares less of the fund.

Closed-end funds, however, trade on exchanges just like stocks. In this case, there is only a limited number of shares and they trade based on supply/demand (as opposed to based on their NAV like open-ended funds). You would expect their price to be near or at NAV, but often they are bought/sold at a discount for liquidity reasons (among other things).

 

[Orsorum]

I think (from what I've seen), regardless of when you put in a buy order for a mutual fund (on Ameritrade at least), it gets executed at the start of the next trading day.