Portfolio

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday fined eight former Fidelity traders $1.04 million for accepting lavish gifts from brokers, not least of which included trips on private jets and courtside sports tickets.

With interest rates falling so low, it will soon cost more for fund companies to run somemoney market funds than their investments, The Wall Street Journal reports. Rather than step in to make investors whole or permit their funds to break the buck, some money funds will likely close.

Fidelity International and its U.K. partner Dalton Strategic Partnership will be saying goodbye to David Urch and Jonathan Cobb, two high-profile equity portfolio managers they hired to work in the Edinburgh office just before the credit crunch, Dow Jones reports.

The Epiphany Fund, which invests according to Catholic principles, can’t exactly boast that it is bucking the trend of most mutual funds going into the red. It’s down 33.5% so far this year.

The Tokyo joint venture between Fortress Investment Group and DKR Capital is laying off an unspecified number of people, Dow Jones reports. However, the office is not shutting down entirely.

Mark-to-market accounting has merit, but financial institutions need better clarity on its application for very distressed assets, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said.

Reserve Management has scheduled payments on 12 of its funds, at $1 per net asset value, to begin this week and continue through the week of Jan. 12. Investors in seven of the funds will be receiving all of their money back.

PIMCO has frozen dividends yesterday on six municipal bond funds because the value of their investments is insufficient to cover the funds' debt.

Treasury four-week bills that yield zero percent have attracted $30 billion in assets, the Treasury Department announced. And when investors trade the paper with one another, sometimes they get negative yields. This is just further proof of investors’ keen aversion to risk. Treasury first issued the notes in 2001.

Fidelity Cash Reserves, a $130.7 billion money market fund, is now the biggest mutual fund in the nation, surpassing American Funds’ Growth Fund of America. And Fidelity Investments is no longer the biggest fund company in the nation; Vanguard is.