Money Management Executive Latest News

As senior vice president, Alliance Capital, wholesaling for the Manhattan region, I oversee about 40 branches and 3,500 brokers. All the branch managers at Prudential, Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS--they all know each other, and everyone tries to get into Manhattan because then they get the accolade of, "Well, you made it."

Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (MLIM) has just announced it will offer its complete family of retail mutual funds to third-party distributors under the Merrill name as well as consolidate its two mutual fund families, which includes the Mercury line, into one.

Stephen Canter is the chairman and CEO of Dreyfus Corp. of New York, with $182 billion in total assets under management, and vice chairman of Mellon Financial Corp. of Pittsburgh, which acquired Dreyfus in 1994.

With a total loss of $10 billion, equity funds have seen their first year of outflows since 1988, and inflows into bond funds are on pace to reach record heights, according to Lipper's November fund flows report.

"Winning Strategies" is the theme of the inaugural issue of Mutual Fund Market News for 2003. While none of us knows what lies ahead this year - whether the stock market will rival the Crash of 1929 by heading for a fourth straight year of losses - fund companies can, at least, gear up with the best stratagems they know how. Speaking of winning strategies, MFMN will award fund technology and operations executives with Thomson Media's 2003 Fund Operations Awards at the NICSA Annual Operations conference in Miami on Feb. 23 (see details in "A Call For Entries!," page 5). Deadline is Tuesday, Jan. 21, to: elizabeth.barney@thomsonmedia.com.

In what should have been a three-month red carpet rollout to an 80th birthday party, the mutual fund industry is not even thinking of a gala. Instead, it is pondering mistakes of the recent past and reforms for the near future.

Sorting the lint from the clean clothes in the scandalous mutual fund dryer is not as easy as some would lead us to believe. After all, the money attached to enforcement of reforms will come from the jeans pockets of middle-class fund investors.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has subpoenaed a number of leading mutual fund names in the state, his office announced Friday.

Strong Financial told its employees last week it is eliminating its 2004 pension plan contributions and ditching its matching contribution to employee 401(k) plans, amid a broad push to lessen costs at the heavily investigated firm.

Banc of America Securities, the securities and asset management unit of Bank of America, may face civil action from the SEC stemming from trading activity in the firm’s San Francisco office.