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Mutual fund spin: Less bad = good?

Could mutual funds, as a group, break even this quarter?

"It's not a bull market... Just a boring, blah market and boy does that feel good," Ted Aronson, founding partner at multi-billion-dollar money manager Aronson-Johnson-Ortiz in Philadelphia, which runs money for big universities and other institutional clients, told Associated Press here. The learned and quantly Mr. Aronson was responding to AP's reading of stock-index data.

AP also reported Lipper mutual fund data, more relevant for retail investors, which shows the typical mutual fund down in the 5% range for the quarter, vs 20% in the fourth quarter of 2008 and nearly 40% for the year. "Returns have improved markedly for the first quarter, although they are still largely in negative territory," says the Financial Times' mutual-fund news aggregator, www.ignites.com .

As a group, funds may post a break-even quarter, if the March rally continues a couple more days. But today isn't likely to help, since Treasury Secretary Geithner's weekend comments shows the bank bailout may need more billions have spooked investors. Bloomberg story here.

Indeed, some investors saw the March rally as an aberration and have grabbed their profits and run. "As of Wednesday, investors had pulled $9.8 billion over the prior seven days from mutual funds that focus on U.S. stocks. That compares with $131 million they added to those funds a week earlier, according to TrimTabs Investment Research," AP concluded.