Money Management Executive Latest News

The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed fraud charges against Geoffrey Brod of Avon, Conn., a former portfolio manager with Aeltus Investment Management, now ING Investment Management, for not reporting 3,500 personal trades he made between 1999 and 2003 that earned him profits of $410,000. Many of the stocks Brod bought and sold he also held in mutual funds that he ran.

Five of the most successful hedge fund managers earned $1 billion or more—each—in 2006, Reuters reports, while the average earnings for the top 100 managers was $241 million. Top performers delivered returns of 30% to 40% last year.

Although it is still far from common practice for mutual funds to charge performance-based fees, more are moving in that direction, the Associated Press reports.

TIAA-CREF shareholders have approved the merger of 11 of its retail funds into institutional portfolios, The Wall Street Journal reports. Fees on six of the funds will rise, while the remaining five funds will see their fees decrease slightly.

Because managers of mutual funds and corporate executives who attended the same university frequently run in the same social circles or maintain their friendships well past graduation, the corporate executives tend to share information with the portfolio managers, a new study found. As a result, the managers tend to invest in those companies, which tend to deliver strong performance because of the quality of the information being shared.

Although growth funds haven’t regained their power ever since the dot-com crash—overtaken in every year since by value funds—some investment experts believe this might be the year that they stage a comeback, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Chinese regulators are likely to take their time approving the 50-plus new mutual funds that are awaiting their approval, sources tell Reuters. Regulators are afraid investors will sock large sums of money in the new offerings, driving up the value of the market.

JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services, a division of JPMorgan Chase, will hire up to 100 new employees for its expanding Boston office over the next year.

It's been three years since the Securities and Exchange Commission began requiring funds to annually disclose their proxy voting records. When the measure was passed, many dismissed it as a mere administrative nuisance, reasoning that even if investors eventually began to pour through funds' voting records, the day when they would be able to systematically make sense of the information, let alone actually be interested in it, was a long way off.

Evergreen Security investors are trying to recover $500,000 from the Orlando-based firm, whose management perpetrated the largest consumer-investment scam in Florida history in the 1990s, according to the Orlando Sentinel.