Money Management Executive Latest News

After working at Fidelity Investments for more than 20 years, Stephen P. Jonas, currently its top investment executive, is stepping down at the end of the month. Robert L. Reynolds, vice chairman and chief operating officer, will continue as president of Fidelity Management & Research, overseeing the senior team.

In the years that U.S. stock markets have risen since 1989, investors placed the least amount of cash in U.S. stock funds in 2006, Bloomberg reports.

Lawrence Lasser, the former chief executive officer of Putnam Investments, agreed to pay $75,000 to settle charges by the SEC he authorized the company to make shelf-space payments to 80 brokerage firms from 2000 to 2003 without revealing this to investors, Dow Jones reports. Twenty of these brokers were paid in cash, the remaining via directed brokerage agreements.

John Hancock Funds, a division of John Hancock Financial Services, is expanding its product line with two new fund-of-funds products, the John Hancock International Allocation Portfolio and the John Hancock Lifestyle Portfolio.

Responding to the growing popularity of lifecycle funds, OppenheimerFunds has launched such a series. The four funds are: Oppenheimer Transition 2010, Oppenheimer Transition 2015, Oppenheimer Transition 2020 and Oppenheimer Transition 2030.

Janus managers are shoring up their funds, and the firm has begun to show signs of recovery from the punishing outflows the tech-focused company faced with the burst of the Internet bubble, and fines related to regulatory actions.The $9.8 billion Denver-based Janus Twenty Fund, which lost 69% of its value between March 2000 and Oct. 9, 2002 compared to 47.37% for the S&P 500, had recovered 17.75% as of Jan. 3, compared to 17.35% for the S&P, according to Investor’s Business Daily. During 2006 alone, the fund, managed by Scott Schoelzel, gained 12.3%, while other large-caps gained only 5.6% on average, according to data from Chicago-based research company Morningstar.

Jersey City, N.J.-based TD Ameritrade last week bought a small Baltimore-based trust company with close to $1 billion in 401(k) assets, according to Investment News. Most of Gail Weiss & Assoc.’s retirement dollars come from registered investment advisors (RIAs).

The list of esoteric exchange-traded funds grew by three, with the addition of three ETFs from VTL Associates, The Wall Street Journal reports.

A recent paper by a group of three finance professors backs up with fact what many have suggested for years: too-fluid mutual funds cost investors more than they gain, according to The New York Times. The study, entitled “Does Motivation Matter when Assessing Trade Performance? An Analysis of Mutual Funds,” examines four model funds—each based on manager motivation—using performance data between January 1980 to December 2003.

As a result of an internal probe, Fidelity Investments agreed to repay $42 million, plus interest, to funds whose traders and portfolio managers steered trades to Jefferies & Co., which lavished them with gifts. A final settlement, however, with the Securities and Exchange Commission is still pending.