A $194-billion private equity giant is retreating from its own mutual fund business, even as it continues to back one of the biggest mutual fund inflow winners in the business.

On Friday, Carlyle Group's Carlyle GMS Investment Management arm filed plans to liquidate its two mutual funds, the Carlyle Core Allocation Fund and the Carlyle Enhanced Commodity Real Return Fund, on May 15. The funds launched last year.

Greg Roumeliotis of Reuters and Devin Banerjee of Bloomberg both reported on the move. Bloomberg reports that the core fund had about $53 million as of November and that "the commodity fund hadn't started accepting money." Carlyle declined to comment to both publications.

Reuters notes that BlackRock alumnus Jeff Holland joined Carlyle a year ago "to lead efforts to introduce alternative assets to eligible individual investors." The wire service points to Diversified Global Asset Management Corp (DGAM), a fund-of-hedge-funds manager that Carlyle bought a year ago, as the private equity firm's "main platform for launching liquid alternative products" now, though DGAM focuses on institutional offerings instead of retail-focused mutual funds. Carlyle also has a private equity fund portfolio with a low minimum investment ($50,000) for individual investors with more than $1 million in net worth.

Yet even if Carlyle ends its own mutual fund business, it won't be out of the space completely. Carlyle backs (through the Carlyle Global Financial Service Partners and Carlyle Partners V funds) fixed income giant TCW [profile], which had the fifth-highest inflows in the mutual fund industry last month. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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