Money Management Executive Latest News

Expensing options could be expensive. While fund industry leaders are calling for uniform expensing of options, some fear such action could drag corporate earnings down by 23% or more. And with the markets as ugly as they have been, now is not a good time to risk further losses, opponents to regulation say.

Of the 510 mutual funds that received five-star ratings from Chicago fund tracker Morningstar at the end of July, 83% of them were posting negative returns, with an average negative return of 9.23% year to date.

And you thought the baseball contract negotiations were tough.

State Street Research & Management Co. recently announced that C. Kim Goodwin is joining the firm on Sept. 3 as its new chief investment officer in its equities division.

GoldK, an online retirement plan provider, announced the hiring of Brian C. McGillicuddy as vice president of institutional implementation, a newly created position. In this role McGillicuddy will lead a project-management team responsible for placing the retirement-plan assets of major clients onto the GoldK platform. He will report to Charlie Hunt, vice president of project management for the firm.

Neuberger Berman recently announced that it has hired Jack L. Rivkin as executive vice president, director of research, research sales and equity trading. He will also sit on Neuberger Berman's executive management committee.

American Century of Kansas City, Mo., lost Randall Merk, its investment chief, earlier this month, and now its head of U.S. growth equities, C. Kim Goodwin, has flown the coop [see "Executive Moves," page 4].

Top executives and financial officers at mutual fund companies will have to certify the financial reports that they file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC decided during an open meeting last week.

Investors who held onto stocks through the bottoms of the 12 bear markets since World War II gained an average 32.5% in the first 12 months of the market's recovery, while those who bought just a week after the beginning of each rebound earned 24.3%, SEI Investments reported last week.

Sherry Copper, chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns Economics, said in a recent report that economic growth in the U.S. should rebound with "potent stimulus coming from low interest rates and rising deficits," after revisiting recent lows in the fall.