Money Management Executive Latest News

Janus Capital has replaced Loren M. Starr, president and chief executive officer, with Girard C. Miller, a filing with the SEC Friday indicates.

Even as Putnam Investments reached a settlement with the SEC late last week, Money Management Executive reveals in this week’s issue that going back as far as the 1980s, Putnam had problems with front-running and personal trades by professional fund managers.

An internal review at Charles Schwab found late trading and market timing, the company admitted in its third-quarter filing, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Morgan Stanley as early as today will settle with the SEC for accepting payments from mutual fund companies to sell their products, without properly disclosing this revenue sharing, to customers, The New York Times reports.

Loomis Sayles & Co. may have conducted trades that have market-timing implications, the Boston-based company announced on its Web site Tuesday, Reuters reports.

As the mutual fund trading scandals widened in October, equity funds on the whole had their biggest month of inflows since March 2002, according to the monthly estimate released Tuesday by AMG Data Services (see MME 10/27/03). Investors added a net $24.5 billion of assets to stock mutual funds last month, up from $17.3 billion in September, the scandals' first month.

With investors withdrawing their money from mutual funds, the corresponding stocks within those funds could see their prices plummet. Putnam Investment's loss of $14 billion in the first week of this month forced the company to sell more than $5 billion in stocks to compensate. This type of necessary reaction could hurt the market.

Fund managers placing their own interests ahead of those invested in the funds.

Brace yourselves. Recent problems in the mutual fund industry with market timing arbitrageurs could spill over into the variable annuity industry.

The mutual fund industry, while still viable and in position to bounce back, needs drastic changes and needs them now, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William H. Donaldson said in a sometimes scathing, sometimes positive speech.