Facts, Facts and More Facts: Fund industry’s selling season off to a sluggish start.

Mutual funds (including exchange-traded funds or ETFs) ended January 2012 with $830 billion in assets, a $24.4 billion increase from the previous month, largely driven by equity market gains. The pace of inflows was relatively modest, with net flows into long-term funds reaching $2.8 billion during the first month of the investment (or RRSP) season. Compared to a year ago, sales were down by close to $1 billion. Fixed income funds were the largest recipient of inflows, attracting $3.6 billion during the month. Balanced funds finished with positive net flows of $188 million while equity funds experienced net redemptions of $1.1 billion. From the product structure perspective, mutual fund of funds (MFoFs) generated $1.9 billion in net flows. Meanwhile, ETF assetbase wrapped up January with a $2.8 billion increase to reach $46.0 billion. All eight ETF providers reported an increase in assets. For more details see our upcoming February 2012 issue of Insight Report http://investoreconomics.com/issue/insight-advisory-service. Posted bySandeep Gosal, sandeep@iei.ca