Fund administrator - this person manages the trading, reconciliations, valuation and unit pricing of the funds
 Trustee or board - this group safeguards the assets and makes sure that the laws and rules are followed
 Shareholders or unitholders - these are the people who own the assets and associated income
 Marketing or distribution company - this company promotes and sells the fund

Here are the ways that a collective investment scheme applies to you in a positive way.

 One of the ways that this scheme applies to you as an ordinary person is that it is a great way to investment money but at the same time you are lowering your risk because of how many other people are also investing money into the investment. What this basically means is that the more people there are in the collective investment scheme the less money you have to invest in the fund, which means if there is a loss it will be lower for you personally.
 Another way that a collective investment scheme applies to you is that you are most likely going to be investing in more than one equity. By investing in more than one equity you are also lowering your capital risk because your capital is spread around rather than focused on one equity, which can collapse due to a number of factors.
 Another way that a collective investment scheme applies to you is that you are basically buying in bulk which will help to make the dealing costs a small part of the investment. What usually happens when you are investing by yourself is that a large chunk of your capital goes towards dealing costs because the dealing costs are normally based on the number and size of each transaction. The more people who are investing the money the more capital you have to spend which means the more shares you can buy, basically this increases the size of the transaction and is only one transaction so it saves you money.

Here are some of the ways that a collective investment scheme applies to you in a negative way.
 One of the things that you need to keep in mind is that the fund manager is going to be expecting to be paid for the decisions that they make. Basically what they will do is take their payment directly from the fund assets and it will be charged as a fixed percentage each year, but sometimes it will be variable. If you were to manage your own investments this would not be necessary.
 Another way that this scheme applies to you as an investor is that you do not have a choice in the individual holdings that make up the fund, but you can choose what type of fund you want to invest in.
 And another way that this collective investment scheme applies to you is that you usually lose your rights that are normally connected with individual investments. What this means is that usually investors hold shares directly and those shares allow the holder certain perks or advantages such as a discount of the company's products, or the right to attend board meetings, but in a collective scheme you lose those rights because you are not an individual shareholder.