Fidelity has long discouraged excessive trading by mutual fund investors. Excessive trading can be expensive and burdensome for long-term shareholders because it can:
- Reduce returns to long-term shareholders by increasing fund costs (such as brokerage commissions)
- Disrupt portfolio management strategies, such as forcing untimely and unwanted buying and selling of portfolio securities.
Historically, we have used a variety of tools to discourage excessive trading in Fidelity funds, including fair-value pricing, redemption fees and the monitoring of roundtrip transactions.
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Roundtrip Transactions
We monitor the number of roundtrip transactions in shareholder accounts. A roundtrip is a mutual fund purchase or exchange purchase followed by a sell or exchange sell within 30 calendar days in the same fund and account. For example, if you purchased a fund on May 1, selling the fund prior to May 31 would incur a roundtrip violation. It is important to remember that share aging FIFO (First In First Out) is not considered when buy and sell transactions are evaluated for roundtrips.
Certain transactions are exempt from roundtrip violations. These include:
- Trades for $1,000 or less. (Please note that if more than one buy order or sell order for a given fund is executed on the same day in the same account, the $1,000 threshold is based on the total dollar value of all orders for that fund.)
- Any transactions in Fidelity Money Market Funds
- Dividend and capital gains reinvestments that are sold within 30 days
- Orders placed via Fidelity Automatic Investments or Automatic Withdrawals features
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Fund Level Blocks
Shareholders that place a second roundtrip transaction in the same fund within a 90-day period will be blocked from making additional purchases and exchange purchases into that fund for 85 days. This block will be applied to other accounts under the same registration.
All accounts affected by the fund level block will be monitored for an additional 12 months following the expiration of the block. If another roundtrip occurs in that fund in any of those accounts during this time, another fund level block will be applied for 85 days.
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Complex-wide Blocks
Shareholders with four roundtrip transactions in the same account across all Fidelity funds within a rolling 12-month period will be blocked from making additional purchases and exchange purchases into any Fidelity Fund (other than Fidelity money market funds) for 85 days. This block will be applied to all accounts under the same social security number (the "Affected Accounts").
All Affected Accounts will be monitored for an additional 12 months following the expiration of the block. If another roundtrip occurs in any of the Affected Accounts, another block will be applied to those accounts for at least another 85 days.
- For repeat offenders, Fidelity may impose long-term or permanent blocks on purchase or exchange purchase transactions in any account under the shareholder's common control at any time.
- These suspensions apply only to purchases and exchange purchases and do not affect the ability to redeem or hold present Fidelity Fund shares.
- Systematic withdrawal and/or contribution programs established through Fidelity and mandatory retirement distributions will not count toward the roundtrip limits.
- The policy limiting roundtrip trades do not apply to Fidelity Money Market funds, however as with all our other funds, Fidelity reserves the right to reject any purchase order, including exchange purchases.
We believe that these trading policies along with our continued use of fair-value pricing and redemption fees (when appropriate) will help protect investors from the costs associated with excessive or short-term trading and benefit our funds' shareholders.
While these policies are designed to discourage excessive or short-term trading, there is no assurance that these policies will be effective, or will successfully detect or deter market timing.
This is a summary of only Fidelity's fund policies; each fund company has their own excessive trading policy stated in their prospectuses. We invite you to read a more detailed description about the Fidelity Funds' policies in the Buying and Selling section of the Fund's prospectus at http://www.fidelity.com.