Money Management Executive Latest News

Merrill Lynch has launched a hedge fund replication index, HedgeWorld reports.

Analyzing the culture at Fidelity Investments, Morningstar unlocked three key elements. The first is star portfolio managers who are allowed to conduct their own brand of investment management and given flexible mandates—but are grounded by such technical criteria as a stock’s price momentum and trading volume.

The NASD issued an investor warning on Thursday, advising senior citizens to think twice about selling their life insurance policies to a third party. While such deals typically bring in a larger sum that the policy’s cash surrender value, they are typically less than its net death benefit, the NASD said.

Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt told a RiskMetrics conference of institutional investors that Wall Street’s, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s and President Bush’s to scale back corporate reforms—most notably Sarbanes-Oxley—will ultimately hurt the markets, Forbes.com reports.

Impressed by the long equity strategy and returns of an intercollegiate investment club mutual fund, Warren Buffet recently invited the directors of the fund, to meet with him, The New York Sun reports. Called Global Platinum Securities and with $250,000 in assets under management, it is the only intercollegiate fund in the U.S. in which students invest their own money and conduct their own research. Returning 8.6% in 2006, the fund not only beat the S&P 500 Index last year, but also the Nasdaq Composite, the Lehman Bond Composite and Fidelity Magellan, and, as a result, the students are looking to keep the fund running after their graduation.

Concern over the volatility of China’s stock market coupled with unscrupulous brokers and a growing confidence in the expertise of mutual fund managers is prompting many of the nation’s investors to move their money from stocks to funds, the International Herald Tribune reports. In fact, assets in Chinese mutual funds jumped 83% to $110 billion in 2006, helping to boost performance.

Evergreen Investments has a number of aggressive plans for growth, Chief Executive officer and President Dennis Ferro tells Reuters in an interview.

As part of Power Financial’s deal with Marsh & McLennan to acquire Putnam Investments, Power agreed to give a large portion of Putnam’s stocks to top executives and investment managers to give them an incentive to stay with the company, The Wall Street Journal reports. The hope is that will help stem the outflows that have dogged the company for the past five years.

The state of Massachusetts has sued Phillip Goldstein of Bulldog Investors, along with related funds and affiliates, for soliciting unqualified investors through the hedge fund’s website, HedgeWorldNews reports.

Janus announced this week that both the company’s chief financial officer and general counsel will leave March 2. The company also said that the departures of Dave Martin and John Bluher are unrelated.