Mutual funds

Prudential Financial, Pimco, Nuveen Investments eye robust markets

Vanguard indicated in a Thursday SEC filing it is postponing its plans to offer short-, intermediate- and long-term municipal bond index funds. Vanguard first submitted its registration statements in June.

Acadian Asset Management has launched the Acadian Emerging Markets Debt Fund, joining the $946 million Acadian Emerging Markets Equity Portfolio, which it has been managing since 1993.

After two weeks in which funds flowing into and out of mutual funds that invest long-term in United States stocks held their own, investors pulled $4.2 billion out of domestic equity funds, the Investment Company Institute reported Thursday.

Assets held in domestic exchange-traded funds increased 28% last year to $994.7 billion.

The sub-advisors who will construct the fund’s regional sub-portfolios hail from offices including those in Brazil, India, Japan and South Korea.

There are several reasons for the long-term performance success of Vanguard Group’s GNMA Fund Investor Shares, but one of the simplest is this: It doesn’t have high fees weighing down its returns.

In the last two weeks of December, investors placed $507 million into U.S. equity funds, the first positive inflows since just before the Flash Crash in early May.

NEW YORK-The U.S. economy will muddle through even as domestic stocks rake in double-digit percentage returns for the third straight year, said Robert C. Doll, the chief equity strategist for fundamental equities at BlackRock, in a breakfast briefing in New York Tuesday.

The mutual fund industry typically focuses on weekly and monthly fund flow figures.

Investors kept pulling their cash from municipal bond mutual funds at a record pace last week as frightened money continued to flee the market.

These are the firm’s first funds to concentrate individually on these areas.

Fund complexes will invest in their IT infrastructure, Confuence predicts.

Janus on Thursday announced the launch of the Janus Global Bond Fund and the Janus Emerging Markets Fund. They are the firm’s first standalone strategies in the global credit and emerging market equity categories.

Don Schreiber Jr., the chief executive officer and founder of WBI, said the funds’ strategies previously were only available to high-net-worth investors through separately managed accounts.

Morningstar honors Bob Goldfarb and David Poppe.

Assets held in exchange-traded funds reached $994.5 billion by the end of 2010, according to data compiled by the National Stock Exchange. That is up 27.1%, compared to a year earlier.

Morningstar announced its 2010 Fund Managers of the Year Wednesday. The awards are based not just on performance in 2010 by over the long term, as well as on fiduciary responsibility for investors’ capital.

Global X Funds on Wednesday launched the Global X Aluminum ETF, which it says it the first exchange-traded fund globally focused on aluminum. The fund tracks the Solactive Global Aluminum Index

Equity funds delivered 16.57% in 2010, with more than one-third of the gains, 6.43%, coming in during the last five weeks of the year, Lipper said.