Mutual Fund Companies See Writing on the Wall
Listen to The ETF Store Show every Tuesday at 9am on ESPN 1510 as we cover everything you need to know about Exchange Traded Funds and the world of investing.
On our most recent radio broadcast, we discussed how John Hancock, one of the more popular mutual fund companies, recently announced that they’re making the jump into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). This comes on the heels of mutual fund behemoth Fidelity announcing an aggressive move into the ETF space with a lineup of actively managed ETFs. Large, traditional mutual fund providers like Vanguard and PIMCO have already made big moves into ETFs. Vanguard is one of the largest ETF providers and PIMCO just launched an ETF in March, the PIMCO Total Return ETF (ticker BOND), that has already gathered well over $2 billion in assets. We explained how the largest players in the mutual fund space are now seeing the writing on the wall – investors are shunning expensive mutual funds and moving to lower cost ETFs. Consider that developed market equity mutual funds have lost $52 billion in assets so far in 2012 after $491 billion in redemptions the previous four years! Meanwhile, ETFs continue to see record inflows.
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