The U.S. fund business added 689 unique new funds (including ETFs but excluding share classes) in 2021. And despite the popularity of passively managed funds, 536 of these funds were actively managed. Collectively, these new funds attracted some $149.7 billion in net inflows for 2021, with passively managed funds attracting some $104.4 billion and actively managed funds taking in $45.3 billion. On the Responsible Investment (RI) funds side—which include funds with traditional socially responsible investing strategies, ESG investment strategies, impact investing strategies, and the like—fund families added 148 unique (again ignoring share classes) RI funds to their lineup. Of these,

U.S. investors pushed equity funds to their fifth consecutive quarter of plus-side performance in Q2 2021 as they focused on the reopening of global economies, a commitment by the Federal Reserve Board to keep its easy money policy intact, and a goldilocks U.S. nonfarm payrolls report for May. For Q2 2021, the average equity fund and taxable fixed income fund posted a 6.36% and 1.55% return, respectively. However, flows into mutual funds and ETFs continued to favor fixed income funds as investors evaluated the loftiness of equity prices and the global spread of the delta variance of the coronavirus while

Although the investment industry is normally not a target for public protests or activist campaigns, we witnessed some actions taken by these groups over the course of 2020 regarding the ESG strategies of some asset managers and their ownership of stocks from oil, gas, and coal companies. The ultimate aim of the activists is to put so much pressure on the respective asset managers that they sell their holdings in fossil energy companies. The announcement that ExxonMobil will be replaced by Salesforce (a software company), after being a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Index for 92 years, was widely

Lipper’s Jake Moeller reviews the Investment Week Sustainable Investment Conference 2014 on November 26, 2014 and examines cash flows into ethical funds. For anybody looking for a feel-good boost heading into the festive season, attending a conference on socially responsible investing (SRI) should definitely be considered. The recent Investment Week Sustainable Investment Conference in London contained a general spirit of goodwill and altruism that permeated a full house of very committed and merely interested delegates alike. For many investors SRI investing, or “ethical” investing as it is still generically known, sits on the periphery of their investment decision-making tree. But