Focus on Funds

2015 Fact Book Highlights

The May 15, 2015, edition of Focus on Funds spotlights the 2015 Investment Company Fact Book, which has just been published. ICI Chief Economist Brian Reid offers his insights on the data and analysis contained in this comprehensive, annual review of industry trends and activities.

Transcript

Stephanie Ortbals-Tibbs, ICI Director, Media Relations: The ICI Fact Book is considered worldwide to be a treasure trove of information on U.S. funds and their investors, as well as on the retirement savings market in the U.S. The latest edition is out, and I spoke with ICI Chief Economist Brian Reid about some of its key takeaways and findings.

Brian Reid, ICI Chief Economist:  The Fact Book actually brings together the bulk of the research that we do throughout the year but also layers in other information that’s not available elsewhere. So, for instance, there’s information about how does the ETF investor look compared to the closed-end fund investor or the mutual fund investor. These are parts of our chapters on each one of those products. We also look at investor reaction to financial market movements. This is one of the ongoing stories that we’ve had for years. We know that investors do tend to put more money in when markets are doing well, and take small amounts of money out when markets are turning downward. But one of the major points here is that even doing those periods of market stress, we don’t see large investor outflows and this is one of the themes that I’ve seen throughout my career in 20 years at the ICI and one of the first projects I worked on. This recurs all the time.

Stephanie Ortbals-Tibbs: Brian, knowing that there’s so much in Fact Book, there are the hard copies, they’re out, there’s also a lot that we put up online. Tell our members about that part of it.

Brian Reid: So the Fact Book does go up online. We’ve put a PDF version up so that you can read through it just like you would a hard copy. Then a few weeks later we put up all the tables in our HTML version. These make sure that the tables are downloadable—our graphs are downloadable, all the data are available. This links up then to the online access to our data that we provide to our members normally through a variety of other features. So it’s a nice way to take the information and create your own charts or replicate the charts that we have in the Fact Book.

Ortbals-Tibbs: That’s this week in funds. See you next week.

Other Resources

• 2015 Investment Company Fact Book (pdf)
• ICI Viewpoints: “2015 Investment Company Fact Book: Letter from the Chief Economist”