Mutual funds: Brazil opens foreign markets to mutuals

Brazil plans to allow the country’s mutual funds, which have $525 billion in assets, to invest an unlimited proportion of their portfolios in overseas assets by the end of this year.

This year, Brazil’s equivalent of the SEC, the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários, issued new regulations (rules 450 and 456) that enable multi-market mutual funds to invest up to 20% of their portfolios in assets issued in countries it recognizes, and pure equity or fixed-income funds to invest up to 10% in the equivalent asset classes in those countries.