New Registered Fund Statistics Report

The Securities and Exchange Commission staff today began publishing a new report, the Registered Fund Statistics report, which aggregates data about the more than $25 trillion registered fund industry. This will give the public a view into the registered fund industry, which includes more than 12,000 mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and closed-end funds.

Providing such data to the public is one of the more consequential things a government agency does. Such transparency creates a public good.

Our founders understood such public goods when they embedded data collection in the Constitution itself with the decennial census,[1] the first of which began in 1790.[2]

Many government agencies, from the Department of Agriculture[3] to the Department of Labor[4] to the Energy Information Agency,[5] provide important aggregated economic data to the public.

The SEC also has had a history of publishing aggregate data with regard to the securities markets. Such disclosures by the SEC and other government agencies help us better understand who we are as a people and how our economy and securities markets function.

The new Registered Fund Statistics report includes more than 70 data tables reflecting aggregated and anonymized public and non-public information filed on Form N-PORT. It is the first time the SEC has made such information public.

The new report builds on the aggregated data the SEC has been producing for the last decade. Since 2014, we have published quarterly aggregated trading information data, sourced from the Market Information Data Analytics System (MIDAS),[6] as well as monthly money market fund statistics.[7] In 2015, we began publishing quarterly private fund statistics.[8] Since 2022, we have been publishing data on the security-based swaps market twice a year.[9]

In addition, the SEC has made data more accessible and usable.[10] Since 2015, the Commission has published data sets from structured disclosures by individual registrants. Currently, the Commission publishes 12 such data sets, and we will begin publishing a Form N-PORT data set in the near future.[11]

Further, since 2021, the Commission has made available Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provide public access to financial statements and other disclosures made by publicly traded companies.[12]

Investors, issuers, economists, academics, and the public at large benefit from such regularly published economic data. The SEC also benefits from the feedback we receive on how to improve the accessibility and usefulness of aggregate data.

I want to thank the talented analytic and economic staff who have worked on the Registered Fund Statistics report so that the public can better understand the markets and broader economy, including:

• Natasha Vij Greiner, Tim Husson, Tim Dulaney, Trevor Tatum, Juan Carlos Forero, Jon Hertzke and Christian Broadbent, in the Division of Investment Management; and
• Jessica Wachter, Nadia Winn, Dan Hiltgen, Guilio Girardi, Robert Luby, and Julie Marlowe, in the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.