What is the difference between institutional and retail mutual funds?

Related Terms. Institutional shares are a class of mutual fund shares available for institutional investors. A retail fund is an investment fund with capital invested by individual investors. In securities investing, commingling (commingled) is when money from different investors is pooled into one fund.

What is the difference between a non-institutional investor and an institutional investor?

They may fail to understand the ways a mass of investors can drive the markets. The difference is that a non-institutional investor is an individual person, and an institutional investor is some type of entity: a pension fund, mutual fund company, bank, insurance company, or any other large institution.

Who are institutional investors?

Institutional investors are the big guys on the block—the elephants with a large amount of financial weight to push around. They are the pension funds, mutual funds, money managers, insurance companies, investment banks, commercial trusts, endowment funds, hedge funds, and also some private equity investors.

Do institutional investors offer more trading opportunities than retail investors?

Institutional investors definitely offer more trading opportunities than retail investors, but that gap is becoming smaller and smaller. A growing number of investments, which have typically been limited to prominent investment funds, are now opening up to retail investors.