General Commodity Funds News

U.S. retail and institutional investors pulled cash from broad commodity exchange-traded funds for a fifth straight quarter even as coffee, natural gas and hogs prices had their best run in years, data from Thomson Reuters Lipper showed on Wednesday. Lipper, which tracks nearly 270 U.S. exchange-traded commodity funds and products worth about $240 billion, noted a net outflow of nearly $2.7 billion in the first quarter of this year. The data contrasts with positive flows for broad commodity exchange-traded products tracked by BlackRock for the same quarter. With the Lipper data, the outflows were largely in two commodity ETFs run by Boston-based mutual fund manager Fidelity Investments. The outflow appears to be slowing from the $16 billion outflow in the fourth quarter of 2013.