Money Management Executive Latest News

The SEC has formed a special committee to help determine whether 529 college savings plans offered through mutual fund companies and brokerage firms are overcharging investors.

Calpers, the nation's largest pension fund with $167 billion in assets, last week adopted a code of ethics for its outside money managers and consultants.

Fidelity has injected extra flexibility and personalization into its variable annuities, and is trying to sell its customers on virtually nonexistent tax penalties.

There is no doubt that a rise in regulation has increased costs for mutual funds in the past few years -- to the point of pain for many small, independent fund companies. But are things bad enough to prompt these companies to give away their assets just to get out of the business?

If advisers needed a go-go growth fund in the late 1990s, they probably turned to Janus Capital Group. Yet the aggressive strategy that Janus used to manage most of its funds ultimately backfired. After the tech bubble burst, the Janus name became a synonym for corporate management turmoil, manager exodus and vast fund outflows.

The standoff between SMAs and AIMR is sort of like Groucho Marx' famous quote that if it was a club that would let him in, he wouldn't want to join it.

The "quiet company" is about to make a little more noise in the financial services market.

Will the growing number of settlements between disgraced fund companies and regulators put pressure on other fund advisors to slash fees, too? MFS, Putnam Investments, BoA and Alliance, the latter with a staggering 20% reduction over five years valued at a quarter of a billion dollars, have paved the way to what has become the industry's $64,000 question.

Too many investment advisors and their partners rely on market indexes as the way to judge performance for clients. The shift to a scenario approach may be the best thing you can do.

In his seminal book "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe wrote of those engineers and test pilots who believed in the 1940s that the sound barrier was a "brick wall" that would cause anyone who attempted to break it to "augur in" and "buy the farm." Chuck Yeager, of course, proved them to be wrong.