Mutual Fund Sales Strong in December : Securities: The soaring Dow Jones average, up 33% this year, is drawing in new investment.

Some of the nation’s biggest mutual fund companies, including Vanguard Group, Putnam Investments and Oppenheimer Management Corp., are reporting stronger sales in December than in November, and expectations are that sales will remain strong in January.

Other companies, including Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., reported a slight slowdown in fund sales.

Putnam said net fund sales were up 21% this month, led by strong interest in stock funds and a turnaround in municipal bond fund sales. “It was one of our best months of the year, and we expect a continuance of the current trend in January,” said William Shiebler, president of Putnam Mutual Funds.

Oppenheimer said fund sales were up 7% from November. “It looks like this will be the highest sales month of the year for us,” said Ellen Schoenfeld, assistant vice president of strategic planning at Oppenheimer.

December marks the fifth straight month that new purchases of Vanguard equity funds exceeded $1 billion, said Brian Mattes, the company’s spokesman. “At the rate cash flow is coming in, more than $70 million a day, we’ll in all likelihood pass this year’s record of $1.27 billion that was set in September,” he said.

Twentieth Century Mutual Funds in Kansas City and State Street Research & Management Co. in Boston also reported improving sales.

In contrast, Fidelity said new sales of stock funds declined to about $2.5 billion in December from about $3.3 billion in November. The nation’s biggest fund group also said sales of taxable bond funds fell to $5 million from $157 million in November and that a net $635 million was redeemed from money market funds.

Money market fund redemptions are common in December, as investors often take money from these accounts to help pay for Christmas gifts, Fidelity spokeswoman Teri Kilduff said.

As has been the case all year, fund companies are reporting strong buying of equity funds. The increase in buying is tied to a rise in the Dow Jones industrial average to the highest levels ever. The benchmark stock average eclipsed the 5,000 mark for the first time in November, and it’s up 33% for the year.

Investors are buying stock funds in spite of warnings from fund companies about higher-than-average year-end distributions--or potentially higher tax bills.

A net $690 million was invested in the more than 900 mutual funds sold through Charles Schwab Corp. in the first two weeks of December, the company said. That’s down from $830 million in October.

Domestic and international stock fund sales were $14.5 billion in November, up from $9.2 billion in October, the Investment Company Institute reported Thursday.

ICI said sales of mutual funds specializing in U.S. stock investments were almost $13.3 billion in November, up from $9.1 billion in October and the highest amount of inflows in a month this year. This month’s results won’t be reported by the ICI until the end of January.

Net sales of taxable bond funds rose in November to $2.2 billion from $1.8 billion in October, marking the fifth straight month of positive sales and the best monthly results of 1995, ICI said.

For the first time since August, investors bought more shares of municipal bond funds in November than they sold, the industry trade group said.