Money Management Executive Latest News

Portfolio managers George P. Fraise and Gordon M. Marchand have returned to John Hancock Advisers as managers of the John Hancock U.S. Global Leaders Growth Fund. The two had managed the fund through sub-advisor and Hancock subsidiary Yeager, Wood & Marshall until July, when Hancock terminated its relationship with the firm because the two managers were leaving to form their own company. Fraise and Marchand will now be Hancock employees while also still serving as principals of their new firm, Sustainable Growth Partners. If and when the fund's board approves hiring Sustainable Growth as the fund's sub-advisor, Fraise and Marchand will no longer be Hancock employees.

Wells Real Estate Funds has hired Michael Dobbs, formerly senior vice president of marketing for Cingular Wireless, as its chief marketing officer. Dobbs has worked as a marketer in the real estate and communications fields for nearly 20 years.

NEW YORK - If only they knew. Many investors who don't own annuities, most of whom own mutual funds, might be interested in buying one - that is, if only they understood how annuities worked, according to a recent survey unveiled here at the annual meeting for the National Association for Variable Annuities of Reston, Va.

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.

American Century has filed with Kansas City to build a $44 million, 12-to-14-story office building to accommodate expected growth, The Kansas City Star reports. The fund company is planning to have it completed between 2008 and 2010.

Saying that it is not cost-effective to buy less than $5,000 worth of Treasury or corporate bonds or less than $10,000 worth of municipals, a new Charles Schwab report recommends bond funds over individual bonds for most investors.

Schoolhouse Capital, the program manager for New Mexico’s 529 plan, and New York Life Investment Management, the plan’s distributor, have added a stable value portfolio from New York Life to the plan, CollegeSense 529 Higher Education Savings Plan.

Technology funds are up 36% year-to-date through last Tuesday, making them the best-performing equity category so far this year, according to Lipper. That’s great news, but it has some fund managers worrying that investors might think happy days are here again, Reuters reports. And according to Money magazine, some investors are again flocking to unprofitable technology firms.

Lockwood Advisors, a subsidiary of the Bank of New York, has partnered with BNY Capital to allow financial advisers to construct municipal bond portfolios for their clients. Through BNY’s trading desk, advisers can now structure passive portfolios of high-quality municipal bonds of varying maturities. The new offering is part of a recent campaign by Lockwood to broaden beyond separately managed accounts with such offerings as a registered hedge fund, a mutual fund supermarket and wrap program and a mortgage origination program.

Details are scarce about what exactly went wrong when MetLife’s securities arm, New England Securities Corp., failed to rebalance asset allocations for 6,000 mutual fund accounts according to their risk profiles. The company estimates that some $3 million to $11 million evaporated from those accounts as a result – losses it plans to repay.