Money Management Executive Latest News

The market may be recovering and equity fund investing perking up, but stable value is still popular if sales at AEGON Institutional Markets are any indication. The company reported sales of $6.3 billion in the first six months of 2003, a 12.5% increase from the $5.6 billion worth of stable value products it sold in the same period in 2002.

Van Eck Funds is planning on removing class B shares on its Global Hard Asset Fund as of Wednesday this week, a filing published with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed. Beginning Oct. 31, all shareholders with class B shares will find those shares converted to class C. Shareholders will no longer be subject to the contingent deferred sales charge but to a contingent deferred redemption fee of 1% for one year after purchase of any class C share. B shares have come under increasing scrutiny over the last few months as regulators and investors have charged various brokerage firms' representatives with selling the expense-laden share class in order to pump up brokerage commissions.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. and the Japan Securities Depository Center (JSDC) want to expand their existing partnership to share information on depository services, clearance and settlement, risk management, infrastructure and legal issues, and straight-through processing. The Japan Securities Depository Center is particularly interested in the DTCC's settlement system based on delivery rather than on payment.

Thomson Financial has partnered with CheckFree Services Corp. to add separately managed account data to the Thomson ONE Advisor portfolio management software for financial advisers. CheckFree's SMA database, which covers 5,000 platforms from 1,300 money managers, represents 90% of the largest investment firms in the nation.

David A. Tiberii and Laurence Linklater have joined the fixed-income team at T. Rowe Price Group. As senior portfolio manager of corporate bonds, Tiberii will oversee the T. Rowe Price Corporate Income Fund and advise other bond managers at the firm. He joins the firm from GE Asset Management, where he oversaw an investment-grade corporate bond insurance portfolio. Before that, he was an analyst with Goldman Sachs.

Brett H. Wander has joined State Street Research & Management Co. as head of the market-based strategies group for fixed-income business, a new position at the firm. He will report to Mark Marinella, chief investment officer of fixed income.

Martin Cohen and Robert Steers are now co-chairmen and co-chief executive officers of Cohen & Steers, an investment firm that specializes in real estate investment trusts. Cohen previously served as president, and Steers was chairman of the firm.

Investing in individual bonds may not be appropriate for the average investor.

Putnam Lovell NBF Securities, the financial services investment banking firm, announced Wednesday it will no longer provide research and underwriting services. Instead, the firm will concentrate on merchant banking, trading and advice, and as a result of the new direction, Putnam Lovell will lay off 35 employees, most of them in New York. The decision was partially fueled by the firm’s hiring of a number of investment bankers this year in its New York, London and San Francisco offices.

Insurance companies generally rely on income from investments to fund reserving requirements for fixed annuities, but the low interest rate environment has caused 87 firms to fail in that effort, according to a report from Weiss Ratings.