This week, Crane Data unveiled an expansion of its daily money market mutual fund information collection, increasing the number of funds tracked by our Money Fund Intelligence Daily from approximately 550 to 940 funds. Since its launch over a year ago, MFI Daily has been publishing 1-day, 7-day, and 30-day yields, assets, average maturities and daily dividend factors on the largest money funds. Now our coverage and benchmark Crane Money Fund Indexes are more comprehensive than ever.
Though the monitoring of daily aggregate and individual asset flows has waned somewhat in popularity as the threat of a run has receded, yield watching has again become a new popular pastime. Only this time the question is how low can yields go? Demand from institutional investors, money funds, regulators and portals has driven our decision to expand our coverage.
Money fund yields continue to grind down to record lows. Our Crane 100 Money Fund Index is now 0.17%, down from 0.23% at the end of June, and down from 2.20% a year ago and 4.97% two years ago. Our other indexes are dismally low too. The Crane Money Fund Average is 0.11%. (Yields are as of July 21 and are all net, 7-day annualized.) The Crane Institutional Money Fund Index is 0.16%, while the Crane Retail Money Fund Index is 0.05%. Our MFI Daily Crane Tax Exempt Money Fund Index is yielding 0.15%.
Among sub-categories, the Crane Treasury Institutional Index is 0.03%, the Crane Government Institutional Index is 0.10%, and the Crane Prime Institutional Index is 0.26%. The Crane Treasury Retail Index is 0.01%, the Crane Government Retail Index is 0.02%, and the Crane Prime Retail Index is 0.08%. (Our daily Crane 100 history may be seen on Bloomberg; enter "ALLX CRNI" to see the listings.)
Our MFI Daily also include commentary on daily and weekly yield and asset trends along with delivery (at 9 a.m.) of our updated website News and Link of the Day features. We also provide custom versions and will soon be adding late-night early delivery options. Let us know if you'd like to see a sample issue or if you'd like to see any additional funds or features added to our daily. Finally, look for Daily data to be added to our Money Fund Wisdom database query system later in 2009.
