Mutual Funds - but there's no mutual fun about it

Can someone please explain to me the purpose that all these different share classes serve?

I’m building a proposal for an advisor, and I’m typing in “PIMCO INTERNATIONAL” into my companies security finder, and it returns like a zillion different share classes.

Makes no sense. Then to make it even more compoundingly irritating, the A share class says it has a minimum of $1,000.00 and the Instl share class has a $1,000,000.00 minimum ----- but in all reality, those minimums are applied at the BD level, so this individual account, despite it being a million dollars, is going to have no problem buying $50k of this mutual fund (the instl class).

What’s the point man? If I was running the SEC I would put all this crap on blast and make it so that no matter who you are, there’s only one share class listed. Just be rid of it.

Unless I’m missing something here??

PS: If any of you work for PIMCO, maybe this thread should make you want to send a postcard or gift basket? Please DM me for my address. Tanks.

Don’t they have different cost structures?

Again, if I was chairman of the SEC I’d do away with all of that.

A shares have a front-end load and a quarter-point trail.

B shares don’t exist anymore.

C shares have largely been supplanted by “advisory fees.”

Institutional shares have no sales charges at all.

Why the difference? Well, just follow the money. They all have their uses, depending on the situation.

But what’s the point green man?

its so dumb. its just varying fees. whether its a front load. back load. management fee. advisory fees. required minimums. etc etc. its all kind of sus to me. just standardize it instead of complicating it. thats why i dont ever tell peopel to go look for mutual funds, there is more complexity and variability that can easikly lead to higher fees. thtere are obviously really good mutual funds, but there are far more bad ones, and to make matters worse, their active approach are more likely to underperform the market in the long run due to the variability of performance. and majority of these mutual funds are closet indexers. or trans indexers. or identify as indexers. something of that nature. maybe they are pan managment where they follow a core satellite approach.

Just like most things, you get a volume discount and mutual fund share-classes are following this.