Money Management Executive Latest News

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the North American Securities Administrators Association announced Monday they are working together to protect elderly investors from investment fraud and the sale of unsuitable securities.

The $10 billion Putnam Voyager Fund, Putnam Investments' second-largest fund, has certainly seen better days. The fund has lost 75% of its assets since 1999 and has delivered a meager average annual return of 40 basis points in the past five years, compared to an annual return of 5.5% of its growth fund peers in that period, Bloomberg reports. In 2002 alone, it plummeted 27%.

Mario J. Gabelli smoothed wrinkles in his relationship with some charter investors last week with a $100 million settlement, according to The New York Times.

If America is facing an obesity epidemic, small-cap mutual funds are not immune, according to Morningstar commentator Todd Trubey.

The U.S. Treasury has proposed a rule that all mutual fund companies be required to report any suspicious financial transactions, hoping to net drug dealers, terrorists and launderers, according to the Associated Press.

Growth funds are shying away from technology and instead looking at construction and manufacturing areas, stocks that they have not considered investments in for almost a decade, according to The Wall Street Journal.

A Fidelity study reveals that 403(b) plan sponsors are showing mixed feelings as they prepare to implement pending regulatory changes to the plan announced by the Internal Revenue Service last month. Among the changes, employers will be responsible for selecting investment choices that make the most sense for participants.

Between the end of 2000 and the end of 2005, assets in U.S. mutual funds swelled from $6.96 trillion to $8.91 trillion, according to data from the Investment Company Institute. Compounded annually, that's growth of a handsome 5.1%, and if the current trend continues, the industry should pass the $11 trillion mark by 2010.

On Wall Street, they say, a hold is as good as a buy, and in the coming weeks a Supreme Court judge might decide whether that's a fact of law, too.

NEW YORK - Call it growing pains. As much as hedge funds have impacted the investment community in recent years, the increased interest in, and significant inflows to, hedge funds from institutional investors have changed the way the $1.1 trillion industry operates.