In the back-and-forth contest between Vanguard and Pimco for the top spot on monthly flows lists, Bill Gross was king of the hill for October.

Morningstar's mutual fund flows report for last month shows that Pimco took in $8.1 billion in October, well ahead of second-place Vanguard's $5.2 billion.

DoubleLine continued its strong performance, coming in third with over $2 billion in net flows. While Pimco's Total Return Fund took in $2.4 billion in October, the most of any fund, the DoubleLine Total Return fund, with $1.9 billion on the month and $17.9 billion on the year, has been the most popular fund so far in 2012.

The flows report makes special mention of iShares $7 billion of net ETF inflows, which "impressive since just $2 billion net flowed into ETFs during the month." Thus far, BlackRock's fee reductions and media blitz seem to be paying off.

And the report contains a special gift to TCW. Morningstar analyst Michael Rawson devotes a paragraph to praising the TCW Emerging Markets Income fund, which he says "continues to shoot the lights out in terms of performance" and is being rewarded with flows.

Alas, the monthly flows report is not all wine and roses. American Funds lost $2.4 billion to outflows in October, and -- stop me if you've heard this before -- equity outflows continued, with $8.2 billion leaving that asset class, compared to $29 billion of fixed income inflows. 

Edited by: Chris Cumming


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