MFS Investment Management
American global investment manager
MFS Investment Management (MFS) is an American global investment manager that was formerly known as Massachusetts Financial Services. Founded in 1924, MFS is one of the oldest asset management companies in the world and has been credited with pioneering the mutual fund. The first mutual fund, the Massachusetts Investors Trust fund, is still in operation today. MFS had $645.3 billion in assets under management as of September 30, 2024.
History
The company was founded in 1924 by L. Sherman Adams, Charles H. Learoyd and Ashton L. Carr. The company's oldest fund is the Massachusetts Investors Trust, a mutual fund created with $50,000 at the company's inception and reported to be "the world's first open-end investment fund". The company used "brokerage channels" to market its shares to the public and later expanded to $14 million in assets over the next five years. During the stock market crash of 1929 the fund survived an 83% loss and went on to create a second fund in 1934. By 1959, the Massachusetts Investors Trust fund had become the largest mutual fund in the United States.
In 1969, MIT was reorganized as Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS) to reflect the firm's broadened scope of products and services.
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This entry incorporates text from “MFS Investment Management” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.