Money Management Executive Latest News

PricewaterhouseCoopers urged fund company executives not to rest on their accomplishments of establishing new compliance departments

Chief executive officers’ outlook on the business climate improved modestly in October, according to a poll of 400 CEOs by Chief Executive magazine. Still, many are seriously concerned about the restrictions of increasing regulations and, in particular, the consequences of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigations on company profits and performance.

Merrill Lynch, Wall Street's biggest money manager, with $478 billion of assets, is charging clients lower prices than No. 2 Morgan Stanley and posting higher returns, as Chief Investment Officer Robert Doll tries to transform mutual funds into the company's fastest-growing business, Bloomberg News reports.

American Funds, the top company in sales among all U.S. mutual funds over the past 18 months, is quietly talking to a California regulator about the practice of shelf space payouts to broker/dealers to recommend certain funds to investors, Dow Jones reports.

Bank One Securities, a former Bank One unit included in JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s purchase of the firm back in July, has been recommended for disciplinary action by the NASD for not having procedures in place to prevent mutual fund late trading, Reuters reports.

Access to the Chinese stock market is getting much easier, and for investors, the timing could not be better, because the market is delivering strong returns, the Associated Press reports.

Mutual fund investors populating smaller retirement savings programs are systematically being charged higher fees than other participants in larger retirement vehicles, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Officials at the Bank of New York in an SEC filing disclosed that regulators are examining mutual fund trades executed by its Pershing unit for possible market-timing violations

With its revenue falling 94% in the third quarter, Marsh & McLennan announced Tuesday that it will lay off 3,000 people, or 5% of its workforce, including roughly 750 people at Putnam Investments and Mercer, its human resources consulting unit.

Brokerage firms that lend stocks to hedge funds and wealthy investors for the practice of shorting often borrow those stocks from mutual funds, earning the funds hundreds of millions of dollars in hefty fees each year. Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to know whether the fund companies are plowing those fees back into the fund assets or retaining some or all of them as profits, TheStreet.com reports.