Practice

After spending the past 10 months as acting chief, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox finally decided to name Rosalind Tyson the official director of the commission’s Los Angeles office – a region that covers Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and Hawaii.

NEW YORK—The European Union’s UCITS, or “Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities,” have been gaining tremendous traction throughout the EU, and even Latin America and Asia. Middle Eastern countries are even beginning to warm up to the instruments, as they are tightly regulated by their host countries and designed to protect the end investor.

The Senate Banking Committee will consider three nominations to the Securities and Exchange Commission this coming Tuesday, June 3.

Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman has declared May 29 as “529 College Savings Day,” in part to draw attention to the tax-advantaged college savings plans and to roll out a new Web-based resource that allows family and friends to make online contributions.

Michael Iavarone may have rung the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday and be poised, as owner of the magnificent Big Brown, to win the Triple Crown, but he can’t win them all.

In what some in the industry are heralding as a backhanded acknowledgement of 12b-1 fees, the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly considering putting a cap on the controversial level-loads.

While it may not decide the fate of about a dozen similar “excessive fee” cases that were brought against mutual fund companies in 2003 and 2004, charging that they should impose institutional-share, rather than retail-share fees on individual investors, it is an important step in the right direction.

Industry leader SEI recently concluded in a white paper that collective investment trusts (CITs) are becoming more popular in the defined-contribution retirement market. In the first quarter of 2008 alone, 63 new collective trusts were launched, and from 2004 to 2007 CIT assets actually tripled.

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously last Wednesday on a proposal that would require mutual funds to provide risk/return, fee and strategy information using the same new digital data tagging system as the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

Talk about tapping into the powers that be inside the Beltway.