Money Management Executive Latest News

The First Eagle Gold Fund has gone from being the best-performing gold fund in 2002 to the worst-performing gold fund in the past three months, Reuters reports.

On top of the 9,000 it has already laid off and the 23 branches it has already shut down since 2001, Charles Schwab will lay off another 250 people and close 20 branches, The New York Times reports. This will result in charges of $35 million to $50 million in the second half of the year.

With taxable bond funds declining in value by 2.51% in July – their worst performance in a single month since April 1987 – investors pulled $1 billion from the category, Reuters reports, citing data from Lipper and AMG Data Services. The bond category that lost the most assets was U.S. government bond funds that invest in mortgage-backed securities. These bonds lost $3.4 billion in assets. Municipal bonds lost $1.37 billion in the month.

The Association of Investment Management Research and the Money Management Institute, the trade association for the separate account industry, are aiming to come to a compromise by the end of the month on a timetable for establishing performance reporting standards, Investment News reports.

While dividend-paying stocks and mutual funds are gaining popularity – with Microsoft stunning the investment world when it began paying its first dividend in February – some financial advisers and investors still prefer companies that reinvest earnings to propel growth, Financial Times reports. Instead of receiving a steady stream of income, they would prefer to see their stocks increase in value.

Franklin Resources and Alliance Capital Tuesday both reported assets as of the end of July, indicating modest increases from the month prior, but relatively sizable gains from year-ago comparable periods.

The National Association of Securities Dealers has suspended four brokers for inappropriate sales of B shares on mutual funds, NASD announced Tuesday. A fifth broker is contesting the charges.

The College Savings Foundation, a trade group consisting of 15 529 plan sponsors, has reportedly hired Financial Research Corp. to create a database detailing characteristics of various 529 college savings plans. FRC is culling such information as assets, investment options, subadvisors, share classes and distribution channels. There are no reports of FRC gathering information on performance, however.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has given Franklin Templeton Investments permission to establish an office in China with its joint venture partner Sealand Securities of Shenzhen, Dow Jones reports.

U.S. fund managers, including Pegasus Funds and Southern Cross, are taking advantage of bargains in Argentina, Reuters reports. With the peso deeply devalued, fund managers are now not just buying stock in but actually buying up large portions or controlling interest in companies in leading industries, food and telecommunications companies. Last year alone, Argentina’s economy contracted 10.9%, putting strains on consumer spending and corporate earnings. The nation’s peso has fallen 70% in value since January 2002, when Argentina defaulted on its debt. The nation still owes $76.7 billion. However, in the first five months of this year, Argentina’s economy grew 6.1%.