Money Management Executive Latest News

Legg Mason and two of its subsidiaries, Western Asset Management and ClearBridge Advisors, will lease 200,000 square feet in the new New York Times building being built in Times Square.

After posting gains of as high as 65% in 2005, hedge funds that invest in Japanese securities are suffering steep declines, The Wall Street Journal reports.

One would think that wealthy people who retire are set for a long and happy retirement. But because many of them invest their nest eggs too conservatively, even they could be ill-prepared for a retirement that could last as long as 30 years, Reuters reports, citing survey by Opinion Research.

The Boston Globe took a look at top mutual fund performers over the past 15 years and found that seven of the 10 highest-return funds were from Fidelity, with the Fidelity Select Brokerage Fund topping the list, with an annualized return of 19.10 percent.

Canadian investors are paying the highest mutual-fund fees across 18 major nations, reports The National Post. They're paying twice as much in fees as American investors, according to a preliminary academic study in circulation.

Hartford Financial Services Group has doubled the pace of its fund sales this year compared with 2005. Second-quarter sales were $2.8 billion. The Connecticut insurer has been able to gain distribution thus far by leveraging the success of its variable annuity business -- it had assets under management of $106 billion at the end of June.

Lincoln National entered into an agreement to purchase approximately 5.5 million shares of its common stock from a third-party broker/dealer using an accelerated stock repurchase program for an initial purchase price of $350 million.

Piper Jaffray announced that it has closed the sale of its brokerage business to UBS.

After five years of increasing sales, the mutual fund industry looks to be losing ground in Canada, Bloomberg reports. Net fund sales for the five biggest banks - including Toronto-Dominion Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce - fell 21% in the first six months of the year to C$5.32 billion from the same period last year, the Investment Funds Institute of Canada said.

Standard & Poor's released its latest mutual fund scorecard, which measures the consistency of top mutual fund performers over time. Through June 30, 2006, S&P's scorecard shows very few funds manage to consistently repeat top-half or top-quartile performance.