Morningstar says lower expense funds hold assets better

Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, today reported estimated U.S. mutual fund asset flows through November 2012. Outflows from U.S.-stock funds are on pace to surpass 2008's record outflow of $96.7 billion. The asset class shed another $14.1 billion in November, with particularly strong outflows from growth-oriented offerings.

However, the selling of active equity funds has not been indiscriminate—those with lower expenses have experienced slower outflows than higher-fee funds. Within the U.S.-stock broad asset class, funds with a Morningstar Analyst Rating of Gold, Silver, or Bronze have exhibited slower rates of decline than Neutral- or Negative-rated funds. Meanwhile, investors continued to shift assets to fixed-income funds, as open-end taxable-bond funds and municipal-bond funds collected $17.9 billion and $5.2 billion, respectively.

Additional highlights from Morningstar's report on mutual fund flows:

• Intermediate-term bond funds led all Morningstar categories in terms of inflows for the sixth consecutive month, garnering $8.3 billion in new assets.
• Investors redeemed $3.6 billion from high-yield bond funds in November, a category that has seen inflows of $24.4 billion year to date, while continuing to add to bank-loan funds. These offerings took in new assets of $1.8 billion in November to bring the year-to-date total to $9.2 billion.
• Although inflows to emerging-markets bond funds slowed to $882 million in November, the category has taken in $20.0 billion for the year to date in 2012, an impressive sum considering that it began the year with assets of just $46.3 billion. Diversified emerging-markets were the lone bright spot within the international-stock asset class, collecting inflows of more than $1.1 billion in November.
• PIMCO took in $6.7 billion to top all fund families in terms of November inflows, but Vanguard, with inflows of $86.2 billion, leads in the year-to-date tally behind the strength of its index fund lineup.

To view the complete report, please visit http://www.global.morningstar.com/novflows12.