Mutual funds

The new rules permit mutual funds to earn income from commodities.

Thirty percent of mutual fund owners are willing to take substantial or above-average risk, ICI reports.

ING Investment Management Americas is launching a globally focused fixed-income fund that is expected to outperform market benchmarks by investing in debt securities for its institutional clients, the firm said Tuesday.

The Basel III bank capital requirements proposed earlier this month threaten to eviscerate the supply of eligible investments for tax-free money market funds — an industry already struggling with a severe supply shortage.

Putnam Investments announced Monday it launched a suite of multi-cap equity funds.

Temenos said late Monday that it will acquire Odyssey Financial Technologies, a supplier of front- and middle-office software for private banking, wealth management and investment management.

The funds, which mark the latest enhancement to the Boston investment manager’s equity products, are designed to provide exposure to the full array of U.S. stocks within the value, core/blend and growth style universes.

Sophis said it established a partnership with a cluster, grid and cloud management software firm, to help investment managers disribute "resource-hungry" calculations such as risk simulations.

Most hedge fund categories saw fund outflows through the first seven months of this year, except corporate action and non-trend funds.

Vanguard Group plans to simplify its Target Retirement Funds and certain other funds-of-funds in an effort to improve the products’ international diversification.

Assets in exchange-traded funds have nearly tripled in the past five years, from $302 billion at the end of 2005 to $819 billion at the beginning of this month. Year-to-date 2010 through August, investors have pulled $29 billion from traditional US equity mutual funds, while ETFs have seen $40.8 billion in inflows. Since risk aversion is rampant at present, what is driving this tremendous and curious interest in ETFs? Can this momentum continue to catapult ETFs to a second big wave of growth?

Quarterly fee payments save the day, as new product sales suffer from a market dip.

The Hartford Mutual Funds will permanently reduce fees on six of its fixed income funds, effective Nov. 1. The biggest reduction is in the gross expenses on share Class A on The Hartford High Yield Fund, which are being reduced by 15 basis points to 1.25%. The other funds are seeing reductions in fees of between two basis points and 10 basis points.

ETFdb.com, an information source and database of exchange traded funds, has launched a free conversion tool that allows investors and advisors to map current mutual-fund holdings to their equivalent ETFs, which typically have cheaper expense ratios and are easier to trade.

The E*Trade fund supermarket now includes 18 funds from USAA Management, 12 of them fixed income. USAA manages $43 billion in mutual funds and $6 billion in managed accounts.

Money managers buck August’s pessimism to enjoy a rosy September.

The Basel III bank capital requirements proposed earlier this month threaten to eviscerate the supply of eligible investments for tax-free money market funds — an industry already struggling with a severe supply shortage.

The exit of capital from mutual funds in the United States has slowed down, but showed signs of picking up steam again this month.

Brown Brothers expanded its relationship with OppenheimerFunds to provide middle and back office services through a new “lift-out” agreement for a $155 billion division.

Brown Brothers Harriman Trust, based in New York City, launched the BBH Core Select mutual fund in 1998 as a small trailer fund to help younger members of its wealthy families manage smaller sums.