How to buy an investment fund

Buying an investment fund is, mechanically, a few steps: open an account at a platform-member firm, place a buy order for an amount, and wait for the order to be priced under the fund's rules. This page explains how a fund is bought, not which fund to buy; it is not investment advice and recommends no fund.

Where funds are bought: TEFAS and a member firm

Most investment funds issued in Turkey are bought and sold through TEFAS (the Turkish Electronic Fund Trading Platform). TEFAS does not open accounts for investors directly; trades run through distribution institutions that are members of the platform — banks, brokerages and portfolio-management firms. So to buy a fund you first need an investment account at one of these firms. You place the order from your bank's internet/mobile branch or a brokerage platform; it passes through the distribution institution to TEFAS and on to the fund's founder.

Article 15(7) of the Investment Funds Communiqué (III-52.1) is the legal basis for participation units being traded through a central fund distribution platform. Under section 6.8 of the SPK's Guide on Investment Funds, with a few exceptions funds must be members of the platform and their units must trade on it.

The order mechanics: you buy in a lira amount and learn the price later

This is the point searchers most often lack. You do not buy a fund like a stock, as "this many units at that price." You enter the lira amount you want to put into the fund; how many participation units you receive is set by dividing that amount by the NAV per unit calculated on the trading day.

The critical detail: the price is not known when you place the order. Most funds use forward pricing. Under Article 14(5) of III-52.1, for funds other than money market and short-term debt-instrument funds, orders are filled "at the unit price found in the first calculation following the placing of the order." So an order you place today executes at a price calculated and announced at the end of that day (for some funds, the next business day). For money market and short-term debt-instrument funds, the order may execute at the last announced unit price. So you cannot know the exact price at the moment of ordering; you learn it on the day the order is priced.

The order cutoff and valör (T+n)

What determines which day's price your order takes is the fund's order cutoff time (işlem kesim saati): an order placed before it falls into that day's pricing, one placed after it falls into the next pricing. On a sale, the money does not reach your account instantly either; it arrives a set number of business days after the trade, and that period is called the valör (T+n).

Neither the cutoff nor the valör period is fixed for everyone in the communiqué; for each fund they are read off the buy/sell terms for participation units in that fund's information documents — part of the investor information form's mandatory content (III-52.1, art. 12(2)(e)). They therefore vary by fund, cannot be reduced to a single number, and may not be published for every fund. Fon.org.tr has a dedicated page for this: see a fund's cutoff times and valör on the Fund Trading Hours page.

Which funds you can and cannot buy

Not every fund is open to everyone:

• Ordinary investment funds (money market, debt-instrument, equity, mixed, participation and so on) are open to the retail investor and can be bought on TEFAS.
• Hedge (serbest) funds are funds whose units are established to be sold only to qualified investors; the communiqué defines the "serbest umbrella fund" type in exactly those words (III-52.1, art. 6). The firm making the sale is in turn obliged to obtain information and documents showing that the investors it sells to hold qualified-investor status (art. 25(4)). If you do not qualify, you cannot buy these funds.
• BES pension investment funds are not bought from an investment account on TEFAS; they are chosen as a fund allocation inside a private pension (BES) contract, through your pension company. Another pension company's funds can be reached without switching companies, through BEFAS (the Private Pension Fund Trading Platform), which Takasbank launched in 2021.
• Private funds, real-estate and venture-capital investment funds, guaranteed and capital-protected funds do not trade on TEFAS at all, under section 6.8 of the SPK Guide.

What to read before buying, and tax

Part of the buying mechanics is reading the fund's public information documents. For every fund a prospectus (izahname) and an investor information form (yatırımcı bilgi formu) are drawn up and published on KAP (III-52.1, arts. 11-12). The form sets out the fund's investment policy, its risk-return profile, its management fee, its total expense ratio and, where applicable, its performance fee, plus the units' buy/sell terms. These document what the fund is and what it costs — not a decision to buy it.

Finally, taxation is part of the mechanics too: a withholding tax (stopaj) is deducted on the income earned, at a rate that varies by fund type. On this site you can compare fees and data on the /fonlar list, and see the nominal and real change of a given amount between two dates on the /fon-getiri-hesaplama. These tools give no recommendation; they only show the data and leave the decision to you.