Money Management Executive Latest News

The Securities and Exchange Commission hit Angelo Haligiannis and his Sterling Watters Group LP hedge fund with emergency enforcement action last Wednesday for lying to investors about performance, complete with false documents, prospectuses and marketing materials.

A new research report indicates that many of the proposed changes to the troubled mutual fund industry would do more harm than good, mostly because of how much money implementing those changes would cost.

Investors suctioned $951 million from stock funds for the week ending last Wednesday, according to research done by the firm TrimTabs.com.

The Investment Company Institute’s weekly look at money market fund assets showed a slight drop, from $1.982 trillion on Wednesday, August 4, to $1.976 trillion on Wednesday, August 11. The decrease of $5.94 billion was due mostly to institutional money market funds’ losses, which tallied $4.77 billion.

Former Conseco President and CEO Thomas J. Kilian borrowed $25 million to buy company stock but never repaid the company, according to the Associated Press. Kilian is one of 11 executives charged with borrowing more than $670 million in order to buy company stock.

More details surfaced last week of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s probe into Wachovia subsidiary Evergreen Investments. Evergreen revealed the name of two of its funds that are being probed and said the ex-manager of one of those funds is also being investigated, Reuters reports.

Socially responsible investing shop Pax World Funds of Portsmouth, N.H. is warning investors of Internet scams, one of which recently targeted its customers.

Investors seeking a personal investment touch helped inflate the assets of separately managed accounts to $528.7 billion at the end of the second quarter, a 19.4% increase from the same period last year and a 6.3% jump during the first six months of 2004.

Janus Capital's assets under management dropped $6.4 billion, or approximately 4.7%, to $129 billion in July, mostly due to market depreciation, the firm said.

Now, mutual funds don't have to feel quite so lonely. The Securities and Exchange Commission and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer have settled their first market-timing case against variable annuity issuers, with fines and disgorgement totaling $20 million.