A new bill making the rounds in Congress could eliminate mutual fund C-class shares, MarketWatch's Chuck Jaffe speculates.

The Investor Protection Act of 2009, which has passed through the House Financial Services Committee but has not yet made its way out of Congress, would implement stricter fiduciary duties for brokers acting as advisors.

To Jaffe, those new responsibilities would make it difficult for these brokers to justify selling Class C shares, which typically forego sales loads and charge higher annual expense ratios. Thus, these classes would be the least attractive to long-term investors.

"This should give rise to the end of the C share, and the whole concept of loads is going away too; any loaded funds will become more the exception than the norm," Geoff Bobroff of Bobroff Consulting in East Greenwich, R.I., told Marketwatch. 

Edited by: Adam Kommel


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