MUTUAL FUND

A mutual fund is a professionally managed firm of collective investments that collects money from many investors and puts it in stocks, bonds, short-term money market instruments, and/or other securities.[1] The fund manager, also known as portfolio manager, trades the fund's underlying securities, realizing capital gains or losses and passing any proceeds to the individual investors. Currently, the worldwide value of all mutual funds totals more than $26 trillion. [2]
Since 1940, there have been three basic types of mutual fund investmentcompanies in the United States. Similar funds also operate in Canada. However, in the rest of the world, mutual fund is used as a generic term for various types of collective investment vehicles, such as unit trusts, open-ended investment companies (OEICs), and unitized insurance funds

History.
Massachusetts Investors Trust (now MFS Investment Management) was founded on March 21, 1924, and, after one year, it had 200 shareholders and $392,000 in assets. The entire industry, which included a few closed-end funds represented less than $10 million in 1924.
The stock market crash of 1929 hindered the growth of mutual funds. In response to the stock market crash, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These laws require that a fund be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and provide prospective investors with a prospectus that contains required disclosures about the fund, the securities themselves, and fund manager. The SEC helped draft the Investment Company Act of 1940, which sets forth the guidelines with which all SEC-registered funds today must comply.
With renewed confidence in the stock market, mutual funds began to blossom. By the end of the 1960s, there were approximately 270 funds with $48 billion in assets. The first retail index fund, First Index Investment Trust, was formed in 1976 and headed by John Bogle, who conceptualized many of the key tenets of the industry in his 1951 senior thesis at Princeton University[3]. It is now called the Vanguard 500 Index Fund and is one of the world's largest mutual funds, with more than $100 billion in assets.
A key factor in mutual-fund growth was the 1975 change in the Intern
Revenue Code allowing individuals to open individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Even people already enrolled in corporate pension plans could contribute a limited amount (at the time, up to $2,000 a year). Mutual funds are now popular in employer-sponsored "defined-contribution" retirement plans such as (401(k)s), IRAs and Roth IRAs.
As of October 2007, there are 8,015 mutual funds that belong to the InvestmentCompany Institute (ICI), the national association of investment companies in the United States, with combined assets of $12.356 trillion