Should You Buy Your No Load From A Titan?

It all started with a press release on July 20, 1992. That day, the king of discount brokerages, Charles Schwab, said it was eliminating transaction fees on the sale of mutual funds from 10 no-load companies. A year later, Schwab had amassed $4 billion in the program and announced plans to expand to 200 funds. The same month, mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments returned fire, launching a no-transaction-fee program that added eight fund families to a lineup dominated by its own no-loads.

The media battle has only intensified since then. On May 9, Fidelity added 198 funds from 10 families and upgraded its auxiliary literature on investments. "We've tried to take a good idea and improve on it by offering more top-performing funds," says Roger Servison, managing director of Fidelity Investments. On May 16, Schwab began offering 86 more funds from 16 families to its institutional clients. And investors can expect more announcements to come. "This hasn't been played out completely yet," says Charles Schwab.