Environment Mutual Funds

Franklin Resources is beating S&P money managers

Franklin Resources Inc. is beating every money manager in the Standard & Poor's 500 index this year. The reason may be investor disdain for equities in the United States, one of the world's few stock markets showing a gain.

Franklin rose 14 percent through Friday, while S&P's 11-member index of large asset managers and custody banks fell 10 percent. Shareholders are paying almost three times as much for every dollar Franklin manages as they shell out for BlackRock Inc.'s $3.7 trillion in assets, and more than four times as much as they're willing to pay for Legg Mason Inc.

The firm, which has built itself from a family business into a global fund manager with 89 percent of assets outside domestic equities, is benefiting as investors put more money into international stocks and bonds. Michael Hasenstab, Morningstar's 2010 fixed-income manager of the year, attracted $10.9 billion through June into his Templeton Global Bond Fund, the most of any U.S. mutual fund, according to Morningstar Inc.

"The big shift in the last few years," Chief Executive Officer Gregory Johnson said in an interview, "is people want to diversify and maintain purchasing power. That's really where global bonds have been such a perfect fit."

Franklin, based in San Mateo, with offices in more than 30 countries, saw assets grow 29 percent in 12 months. The firm, the fifth-largest U.S. mutual-fund company, had $734.2 billion under management at midyear, including $83.6 billion in domestic equities.

Industrywide, 43 percent of the money overseen by stock and bond managers is in U.S. equities, according to research firm Morningstar.

"Franklin is the most global asset manager," Jonathan Casteleyn, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, said in a telephone interview. "They have the ability to search out and find the bull market."

The company may report a 35 percent increase in fiscal third-quarter profit to $485 million today, according to the average estimate of 11 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Mutual funds that focus on U.S. equities lost an estimated $8 billion to redemptions this year through June 29, according to data from the Investment Company Institute in Washington. Clients poured about $104 billion into Franklin's bond funds in the two years ended March 31, while pulling $2.9 billion from the firm's stock funds.

Franklin's stock has more than tripled since the S&P 500 fell to a 12-year low on March 9, 2009. S&P's asset-manager index has almost doubled.

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