Long-term mutual funds fell $879 million in the latest week as investors pulled money from domestic stock funds and bonds; Equity mutual funds have recorded weekly gains for most of 2013, after investors had avoided them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis

August 22, 2013 Leave a comment

August 21, 2013, 8:50 p.m. ET

Long-Term Funds Drop

NATHALIE TADENA

Long-term mutual funds fell $879 million in the latest week as investors pulled money from domestic stock funds and bonds, according to the Investment Company Institute. Equity mutual funds have recorded weekly gains for most of 2013, after investors had avoided them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, bond funds have recorded outflows in recent weeks amid a recent run-up in interest rates. For the week ended Aug. 14, equity funds had inflows of $1.49 billion, down from prior-week inflows of $3.41 billion. Domestic equity funds declined by $764 million, while foreign equity funds gained $2.26 billion.Bond funds had outflows of $3.92 billion, compared with outflows of $2.09 billion in the previous week. Taxable bond funds slipped by $1.84 billion while municipal bond funds were down $2.09 billion.

Hybrid funds, which can invest in stocks and fixed-income securities, had inflows of $1.55 billion, compared with prior-week inflows of $1.33 billion.

Meanwhile, assets in money-market funds increased by $4.1 billion in the latest week as prime, government and tax-free funds all recorded gains, according to iMoneyNet.

Money-market funds are widely owned by retail investors, companies and others looking for a safe place to put their cash. iMoneyNet has reported fund inflows for four consecutive weeks.

For the week ended Tuesday, total assets in money-market funds increased to $2.614 trillion, iMoneyNet said.

The firm’s read on the seven-day yield for taxable money-market funds held steady at 0.01%. The Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve’s policy-setting panel, plans to keep interest rates at exceptionally low levels until the U.S. economy shows signs of solid growth.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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