Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Why do people invest in mutual fund rather than directly buying shares?
There are several reasons. One, mutual funds provide instant diversification.  To build a diverse portfolio "manually" (by buying individual shares) requires a lot of time and effort.  If your portfolio is not diverse, then it is wrong to say "buying shares gives higher return"; in many cases diversification will increase your returns. Two, mutual funds reduce transactions costs.  If you buy individual shares, you pay transactions costs every time you buy or sell.  If you buy and sell the shares of many companies, you must perform many transactions and thus incur heavy fees.  With mutual funds, a single transaction gets you access to many companies.  In addition, it is often possible to buy mutual funds without paying transactions costs at all (although you will still pay fund expenses). Three (sort of a combination of the previous two) it is just easier.  Many people can easily buy mutual funds with no cost and little effort through their bank.  It is also simple to set up auto-investment plans so that you automatically save money over time.  All of these things are much more complicated if you try to buy many individual shares. Four, if you buy the right kinds of funds (low-cost index funds), it is probably more lucrative than buying individual shares.  The odds that, through carefully selected stock-buying, you will earn more than the market average are small.  Even professional stock-pickers consistently underperform broad market indexes. In short, it is not true that "buying shares gives higher return", and even if it were, the convenience and diversification of mutual funds would still be good reasons to use them.