The correct answer is      (A.)  0.43%

The average ETF in fund tracker Morningstar's database has an expense ratio of roughly one-third of the average open-end mutual fund. And as a result, investors get to keep a bigger share of an ETF's returns. On an $100,000 investment, for example, an investor earning +10% annually would have saved a total of $127,883 in fees after 30 years -- an additional +127.8% return on the original investment.

Why Are ETFs So Cheap?
Because most ETFs don't require an extensive network of research analysts and investment specialists to operate day-to-day, their fees are very low compared with the typical mutual fund. ETFs are designed to track an index, and their portfolios therefore have less need for managers, they make fewer trades, and they have lower turnover than more actively managed closed-end funds.

This is just one of the reasons investors can't get enough of ETFs. In the mid-1990s, less than two dozen of these funds were trading on the American Stock Exchange; today, more than 600 different ETFs -- worth over half a trillion dollars in total market value -- trade on all the major U.S. exchanges. In fact, they are the fastest-growing segment of the fund market: there are on average of nearly 25 new ETFs per month (versus only four new closed-end funds per month).

With the rapidly expanding market for ETFs focusing on all types of sectors, it can be difficult to distinguish which one would make a good addition to your portfolio. Fortunately, that is where ETF Authority editor Nathan Slaughter comes in. After several years of exhaustive research, Nathan has developed a proprietary system of grading ETFs he calls the ETF Composite Score. With this method, Nathan breaks every ETF he covers down to one simple and easy-to-understand letter grade, taking into account many factors including expense, volatility, performance, relative returns, tax efficiency and many others. To learn the grades of the most popular ETFs available today, please visit this link.