Mutual funds

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.

Fairholme Funds has launched the Fairholme Allocation Fund, which will seek long-term returns from capital appreciation and income by investing in equities, fixed income, cash and cash equivalent securities.

Nuveen Investments on Dec. 31 completed its acquisition of FAF Advisors, with FAF’s parent company, U.S. Bancorp, receiving a 9.5% stake in Nuveen, plus cash consideration in exchange for investment management of the FAF mutual funds.

On the ninth day before Christmas, money invested in U.S.-listed exchange traded funds and exchange-traded products crossed $1 trillion for the first time. The total actually was $1.027 trillion, with $887.2 billion in ETFs and $115.5 billion in ETPs, as tabulated by BlackRock's Global ETF Research and Implementation Strategy Team.

2010 was a year of many challenges. The May 6 Flash Crash and the fallout of the December 2009 arrest of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff kept investors away from stock funds. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed. Mutual funds and their sales intermediaries were charged with more accurately calculating the cost-basis of original investments in securities, and funds prepared for the Jan. 1, 2011 XBRL deadline.

MFS Investment Management has historically been best known for its bond funds—but it’s the firm’s Municipal High-Income Fund (MMHYX) that stands out as a gem of consistency.

The tax-free money market fund industry continues to shrink rapidly, squeezing what had been a major source of short-term credit for municipalities and arguably leading to higher borrowing costs for state and local governments.

Both stock and bond funds saw net withdrawals last week.

Investors withdrew $8.48 billion from long-term funds in the week ended Dec. 15, the Investment Company Institute said Wednesday. The lion’s share of those withdrawals came from bond funds, which lost $8.62 billion. The week earlier, bond funds had outflows of $1.66 billion.

Investors continued to ferry cash out of their municipal bond mutual funds at historic rates last week as a tumultuous sell-off sowed fear among buyers.

Rollovers into traditional IRAs occur evenly across all age groups and play a significant role in the growth of IRA assets, according to research by the Investment Company Institute and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, released Thursday.