The year in numbers
From CBS Marketwatch
The Investment Company Institute released its annual report on mutual fund assets, and it looks like things were booming in the mutual fund business last year. New sales of stock mutual funds rose 31 percent to a record $918 billion, and equity fund assets hit $4.04 trillion, also a record. Funds with large technology positions were the big winners, while capital appreciation funds, heavy with tech, nearly doubled their net flow. Despite mediocre performance by the S&P 500, index funds continued to rake in investor dollars. And cash flow patterns indicated that investors viewed the Y2K situation with a yawn.

Fortune to launch e-index fund
From Morningstar
Fortune magazine, which recently created the e-50 index of internet companies, will soon launch a mutual fund based on that index. The index is subjectively selected, and consists of companies that Fortune's index committee believes are, or will be, the major players in the Internet economy. Fortune isn't the first magazine to jump into the mutual fund arena. Wired magazine created its Wired index in 1998 and teamed with asset manager Investec Guinness Flight to launch the Guinness Flight Wired Index Fund in 1999. Although Morningstar wasn't keen about its expenses, the fund managed to outperform more than 90% of its large-growth peers in 1999.

McCall busy at Merrill
From Morningstar
James McCall has been busy since joining Merrill Lynch last November. The portfolio manager, who scored impressive results at PBHG prior to joining Merrill, runs two funds for Merrill (Merrill Lynch Premier Growth and Merrill Lynch Focus Twenty), and recently took over two for Mercury Asset Management, which Merrill bought in 1997 (Mercury Premier Growth, Mercury Focus Twenty). Running the four funds shouldn't be too much of a burden, since they're really only two portfolios and still relatively small for large-cap growth funds, said Morningstar analyst Kunal Kapoor.

Index funds losing their luster
From The Wall Street Journal
Index funds boomed have in recent years, when they were delivering some of the best returns in the mutual fund world. But now that returns have dropped, investors are turning up their noses at them. The practical attributes of those funds, like low costs and tax efficiency, no longer seems so important. The biggest decline was felt by portfolios that track the S&P 500 index, which has suffered uncustomary weak performance as of late. But some areas remain strong, including funds which track the Nasdaq and Internet indexes. 

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