BOSTON (Reuters) - Fidelity Investments' money-market fund assets have climbed $116 billion, or 20%, over the past 12 months as investors embrace higher yields for their idle cash, research firm Crane Data said on Thursday.
At the end of July, Boston-based Fidelity had $710 billion in money-market fund assets, according to Crane. Fidelity is the No. 1 money-market fund provider in the United States. Vanguard Group, which is second largest, had $381 billion in money fund assets, up $72 billion over the past 12 months, according to Crane Data.
Crane's 100 Money Fund Index shows an average seven-day net yield of 2.12%.
Investors are pulling money out of "plain vanilla" bank savings accounts, yielding less than half a percent, and pushing some of it into money funds.
It is a boon for the $3 trillion-plus industry, whose yields cratered to as low as 0.02% in 2014, a far cry from the 5% yields investors got in 2007 before the Great Recession.