Money Management Executive Latest News

The nation's fund managers are bullish about the prospects for the global economy, according to a poll released yesterday by Merrill Lynch.

Fidelity Investments has partnered with several Wall Street firms, including Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston and Lehman Brothers, to revamp the Boston Stock Exchange, turning the 170-year-old mart into an electronic network rivaling the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, Boston Globe reports this morning.

The NASD, increasingly concerned that brokers may be wrongfully selling or using hedge funds for their professional clients, is now investigating hedge funds.

In an effort to enhance bond and money market mutual fund product lines for individual investors, Boston-based Fidelity Investments is on the move to make them more accessible to individual investors.

Looking across the Web sites of 15 different 529 offerings from a variety of brokerage firms, a new study from Corporate Insight finds that both product pricing and information is difficult to find and nearly impossible to compare. Some sites had out-of-date information and even customer service representatives who didn't acknowledge the existence of a 529 plan.

The latest news out of Washington has President Bush's top Social Security adviser playing to Democrats in the hopes that the administration can slip its controversial private accounts into the program's reform plan.

The New York Stock Exchange has ordered Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith to pay a $10 million fine for a failure to deliver prospectuses to customers in mutual fund transactions and other supervisory and operational lapses, according to an Aug. report from Dow Jones.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged four brokers and a day trader for improperly using a squawk box, the internal Wall Street communications system.

The New York Stock Exchange is fining Merrill Lynch $10 million for failing to deliver mutual fund prospectuses. Merrill failed to deliver the reports in at least 64,000 transactions for the sales of registered, open-end mutual fund securities. Merrill also failaed to deliver prospectuses in 900 transactions in 275 accounts related to auction-rate preferred stocks between January and July in 2004, NYSE charged.

NASD has fined Hantz Financial Services $675,000 and its CEO another $25,000 for fraud and misrepresentations relating to undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangement along with other violations.