Portfolio

Rampart Promotes Two to Managing Director

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examination released a new ComplianceAlert recognizing common flaws and weaknesses among mutual fund companies. The SEC found deficiencies in soft-dollar practices, mutual fund proxies, personal trading by investment advisory employees, valuation and liquidity issues for high-yield municipal bond funds, broker/dealers’ valuation of collateral management processes and a variety of other issues.

The Senate doesn’t like either campaign, each of which ran in the Washington area. TIAA-CREF has since pulled its ads, but Fidelity, claiming all of its communications go through legal review, is still running them.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidance last week for fund boards of directors in assessing their firm’s soft-dollar practices. The SEC said it was issuing the guidance a full two years after the limitations it put on soft dollars in 2006, restricting it only to research, due to rapidly evolving market and trading practices. True enough, there are wide discrepancies among brokerages today, due to rapidly evolving markets, trading practices and electronic crossing networks. Fund companies have until Oct. 1 to comment on the SEC’s guidance.

SEC, Department of Labor Join Forces on 401(k)s

America's new mass affluent blend so effortlessly into society that it's often impossible to tell them apart from a traditional middle class family one day, or from an upper class family the next.

WASHINGTON — The Investment Company Institute last Monday urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to expand its proposed credit rating agency rules on structured products to include municipal securities, and to increase the secondary market disclosure requirements for the municipal market.

NEW YORK - A lot of people are wondering when the U.S. will adopt the same international standards for financial reporting that Europe and the rest of the world seem to be moving toward.

Massachusetts sued Merrill Lynch on July 31 on the charges of fraud and “dishonest and unethical” conduct, Reuters reports.

Assets of money market mutual funds fell by $5.08 billion to rest at $3.502 trillion during the week ending July 30, according to the Investment Company Institute.