BK Bank of New York Mellon Corporation

By Leslie Josephs 

A software glitch this week at fund administrator Bank of New York Mellon Corp. caused difficulties in pricing many mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, prompting some fund sponsors to publish lists of funds whose stated asset values were erroneous.

What can you do if one of your funds is on the list, meaning you may have overpaid for shares?

Reach out to your fund company and ask for a refund. They don't have to give you one but firms may do so because of their often long-term relationships--ones they want to keep--with investors, analysts said.

The answers you get may depend on the type of fund you own.

Mutual funds may face easier-to-adjudicate claims because of the nature of their product, analysts said, and may be more likely to compensate investors because they and their shareholders tend to be less trading-focused.

"I think that mutual-fund companies tend to have longer-term relationship with their shareholders and may be more accommodative, whereas ETF investors may be more short term in nature," said Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual fund research at S&P Capital IQ.

Mutual fund trades in general are easier to track, he said, "because they're executed only once at the close."

In exchange-traded funds, in which investors can buy and sell throughout the day and whose price can become divorced from the underlying assets even without the market unrest of this week, investors' options may be more limited.

Several exchange-traded fund providers, including Guggenheim Partners LLC, First Trust Advisors LP and Van Eck Global, said the net-asset values in some funds that were calculated as of the market close on Monday contained errors greater than 1%. But some analysts said that isn't a large swing in the ETF world and it might be possible for providers to argue that they don't owe investors anything.

Incorrect pricing could affect investor decisions.

For example, First Trust Advisors said Wednesday that the per-share net asset value of its First Trust Nasdaq Auto Index Fund on Monday was overstated by 69 cents, which could potentially inform an investor decision, although some analysts said the amount is too small to make much of a difference and that most ETF trading is done independent of the end-of-day price.

"Was the deciding factor in your making an investment decision? Then I suppose you could, as an investor, claim that you've been misled and sue" the ETF provider, said Dave Nadig, director of exchange-traded funds at FactSet.

He said such a claim seems unlikely in response to "one day of disconnect for a fairly small amount of money."

Write to Leslie Josephs at leslie.josephs@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 26, 2015 19:36 ET (23:36 GMT)

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