News
Commodity funds on the rise:
Monday, January 31, 2011
For all the talk about the runaway success of exchange-traded funds, there is at least one sector where traditional mutual funds maintain their supremacy: commodities.
Over the past year, commodity mutual funds have proportionally seen roughly five times the net inflows that commodities ETFs have seen. By comparison, over the same period, stock mutual funds saw about three times the net inflows of stock ETFs on a proportional basis.
There is one notable exception: the precious-metals subsector, where ETF flows significantly outstrip those of mutual funds.
Data from fund-tracker Lipper Inc. show that 94 mutual funds in the broad commodities space saw $11 billion in net inflows, compared with $1 billion for 54 ETFs. Meanwhile, the 25 precious-metals ETFs have seen close to $8 billion in net inflows, compared with 74 like-minded mutual funds that have reaped $3.7 billion.
