Money Management Executive Latest News

A union boilermaker smashed a brick into the head of a Putnam Investments phone operator earlier this year, worried that the man was about to report the union’s questionable stock-trading practices to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Improper trading – once virtually unreported upon in the mutual fund industry – has been admitted to by half the companies questioned about it by the Securities and Exchange Commission, The New York Times reports.

Mutual fund companies are reaping immediate benefits of the 401(k) plans they oversee while investors are not, New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson reported Sunday.

Class B shares of mutual funds consistently underperformed both Class A and Class C shares over trailing three- and five-year periods and maintained the highest expense ratio of the three share classes, according to a recent Standard & Poor’s study.

Mutual fund disclosure is a hot topic these days, and U.S. government bond funds are among the latest to attract the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

To pay for his legal costs, the first broker to face criminal charges under the wide-ranging mutual fund probe has sued his former employer, Bank of America, The Wall Street Journal reports.

To forge control of a booming but lightly supervised industry, the European Union should steer hedge funds toward its jurisdiction, according to a European Parliament report obtained by Reuters.

Prudential Securities brokers in the firm’s Garden City, N.Y., office are being investigated by the New York attorney general and Securities and Exchange Commission for improper mutual fund trading, The New York Times reports.

NEW YORK - Despite enjoying exceptional growth over the past five years, the separately managed account industry is now at a crossroads. The fragmentation of its infrastructure and growing operational challenges pose a significant hurdle for both sponsors and managers. Determining the best path for integrating operations with sales and marketing and how to improve the sponsor-manager relationship have many folks scratching their heads.

Despite the increasing number of securities fraud allegations at major fund shops, investors' doggedness in the face of adversity boosted stock funds to another strong performance last month.