Portfolio

Stein Roe Mutual Funds of Chicago has launched the Stein Roe Growth Investor Fund, a no-load, multi-cap growth fund. The fund will mimic the Stein Roe Young Investor Fund, which delivered a 17.65 percent return in 1998. David Brady and Erik Gustafson, who have co-managed the Young Investor fund, will also assume responsibility for the Growth Investor Fund.

Branching into the retail retirement services business, American General Financial Group is creating a family of 23 mutual funds called the American General Fund Group.

Scudder Kemper Investments of Boston has introduced the Scudder Select 500 Fund and the Scudder Select 1000 Growth Fund, two funds meant to offer no-load investors an institutional money management approach. The first fund will be benchmarked against the S&P 500 and the second, the Russell 1000.

Groupama Asset Management of New York, an investment management firm, will launch its first mutual fund, a large-cap growth fund, to gain a broader U.S. customer base for the company. The fund, to be called the GAMNA Focus Fund, is in registration with the SEC. Groupama Asset Management is a division of the French insurance conglomerate Groupama.

Insurance companies are building their mutual fund sales, hoping to take advantage of the increasing interest in these investment vehicles and the pending explosion in retirement savings, industry experts say. Insurance firms are drawing on the strength of their established variable annuity distribution systems to compete with full-service investment houses.

IDEX Mutual Funds of St. Petersburg, Fla., has added five new funds to its family: IDEX T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth, IDEX T. Rowe Price Small-Cap, IDEX Pilgrim Baxter Mid-Cap Growth, IDEX Salomon All-Cap and IDEX Goldman Sachs Growth. The names include the sub-adviser on each fund. IDEX is also including the names of its sub-advisers on the 13 other existing funds in its family.

ProFund Advisors has created two new no-load funds: the UltraEurope ProFund and the UltraShort Europe ProFund. The two funds seek performance relative to the ProFund Europe Index (PEI), which is based on indexes of the markets in Britain, France and Germany. The UltraEurope fund seeks to double the results of the PEI, while the UltraShort Europe seeks to double the inverse of the PEI.

Ranson & Associates of Wichita, Kan. has made a second offering for its Value Line No. 1 Strategy Trust, a Unit Investment Trust (UIT) first offered in January. It has since raised $27.5 million.

The mutual fund family of Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA) of Goshen, Indiana, has become a success story for small funds that invest in socially-conscious ways.

MassMutual Retirement Services of Springfield, Mass., has revamped its web site with a sophisticated calculator for its defined contribution and defined benefit customers. The calculator automatically lifts information on client accounts out of various MassMutual records into an analytical engine capable of processing various scenarios for a shareholder's retirement. Also, the calculator stores whatever new information the customer supplies to it. The calculator can even automatically re-balance a shareholder's portfolio.