You Wall Street tool, you

Whether you have $1,000 or $1 million in a mutual fund, you're a capitalist, Brett Arends writes in the Wall Street Journal. You're providing America's risk capital.

So how does Wall Street treat you?

To the barricades, I say!

According to Morningstar, the average money manager skims fees of 1.4% a year from your stock fund, and 1% from your bond fund. 

It may not sound like much, but it is. Especially these days, when returns are so low anyway.

Look at the cost over time. Consider someone who invested $1,000 every year for the past 30 years in a balanced portfolio of 60% U.S. stocks and 40% bonds. Today, after paying fees, he or she would have about $105,000. 

Sound good? Without those fees they'd have $137,000. Wall Street effectively pocketed the other $32,000. 

The picture is even starker than it looks. After all, you could have ended up with $54,000 just by keeping your money in risk-free Treasury bills. 

So your reward for risking your capital was a more modest $51,000. It should have been $83,000. But Wall Street pocketed nearly 40% of your return. 

Furthermore, the true picture on costs is surely much higher. Fees used to be even higher than today. And we're not even counting the extra hidden cost of trading expenses. 

Wall Street claims "management fees" are the price you pay for having them manage your risks. How'd that work out? In the 2008 crash, the average "actively managed" mutual fund actually did worse than an index fund. So much for that.

I'm gonna head down to Wall Street and camp out in the park and get free food and urinate on a shrub.