T. Rowe Price Closes Mid-Cap Growth Fund

T. Rowe Price Group said on Monday that it had closed its popular Mid-Cap Growth fund to new investors, citing heavy cash inflows.

Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price said the fund had grown to $9.8 billion from $5.7 billion at the start of the year.

If the inflows continued at the recent pace, they could hurt the fund’s ability to stick with “higher-quality mid-cap growth stocks,” manager Brian Berghuis said.

The fund industry often has been criticized for allowing individual fund portfolios to grow too large, hampering managers by overwhelming them with new money to invest.

Mid-cap stocks have been a popular market sector this year. The T. Rowe Price fund is up about 35% this year, compared with about 22% for the blue-chip Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

T. Rowe Price said it would continue to accept new money for the fund from existing shareholders.