MUTUAL FUNDS UP IN FIRST QUARTER : INVESTORS UNSHAKEN BY RECENT SHORT-TERM STOCK DROPS.Byline: Edward Wyatt The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times While stock and bond markets continued to suffer a rough patch Wednesday, evidence mounted that investors were not losing their appetites for stock and bond mutual funds Bond mutual fund A mutual fund which primarily or exclusively holds bonds. . Far from it: A mutual fund trade group estimated that investors poured more cash into stock and bond funds in the first quarter of 1996 than in the first nine months of last year. The Investment Company Institute, a mutual fund trade group, estimated that stock and bond funds took in a net $23 billion in March. While that was down slightly from February's total, it also supported contentions by mutual fund companies that individual investors did not flee the markets after a sharp decline in stock prices early last month. ``Investors have had a very minimal reaction to short-term drops in the stock market,'' said Mark Geist, president of Montgomery Asset Management, a fund company based in San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden . While the company may see cash flows slow down for a day or two in reaction to short-term trends Short-term trend Erratic price movements that last less than three weeks. like that seen in the last few days, Geist said, ``it's really not enough to take notice of. Of course, we haven't had a long-term drop to test the resolve of investors.'' On Wednesday, however, stocks continued to follow bonds lower. The Dow Jones industrial average Dow Jones Industrial Average The best known U.S. index of stocks. A price-weighted average of 30 actively traded blue-chip stocks, primarily industrials including stocks that trade on the New York Stock Exchange. fell 74.43 points, to 5,485.98, the fourth straight decline in the market bellwether Bellwether A leading indicator of trends. Notes: A bellwether stock is a stock that is used to gauge the performance of the market in general. General Motors was an example of a bellwether stock, hence the saying "What's good for GM is good for America. . In the last four trading sessions, the Dow industrials declined 3.6 percent, with most of the loss coming since Friday, when the Labor Department The Department of Labor (DOL) administers federal labor laws for the Executive Branch of the federal government. Its mission is "to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working reported that for the second month in a row, American companies added more jobs last month than analysts expected. Bond prices fell to drive the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond up to 6.94 percent from 6.83 percent - the closest the benchmark measure of long-term interest rates has been to 7 percent since August. Prices and yields move in opposite directions from each other. A newsletter that tracks mutual funds says that a record amount of money flowed in stock funds in the first week of April. |
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