Money Management Executive Latest News

Lazard Asset Management of New York will begin offering alternative investment products to high net worth investors and institutions through Lazard Alternatives, a new company that will offer its first product, a hedge fund-of-funds in August, according to company documents filed Friday with the SEC.

Henderson Global Funds of Chicago has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to open a new fund that will invest in the stocks of European companies.

The $300 million Brazos Micro Cap Fund closed to new investors as of June 4, John McStay Investment Counsel of Dallas, the fund's investment adviser, announced.

T. Rowe Price Associates of Baltimore has opened an investor center in Oak Brook, Ill, a suburb of Chicago, its tenth walk-in investor center for both existing and prospective customers.

Rick Groom has joined the Dreyfus Corporation of New York as national sales manager and head of Dreyfus' wholesaling group. Groom was most recently a managing director at J.P. Morgan Fleming Asset Management of New York.

BOSTON - Increasingly, competing in the retirement market requires plan providers to offer more than products, according to industry executives. Providers need to market a variety of services to plan sponsors and their participants and provide guidance and information on issues that may not relate directly to investment products, executives said.

In an effort to limit market timing activity, firms are increasingly attaching redemption fees to funds. As of the end of March, 585 funds charged redemption fees, up 82 percent from the end of 1999, according to a study by Financial Research Corporation of Boston.

BOSTON - New Internal Revenue Service regulations adopted in January change the required minimum distribution rules for retirement plans and will force IRA custodians and trustees to monitor their IRA clients' accounts more closely, according to industry executives.

On a late May morning, Richard Brown, chief financial officer of John Hancock Funds, arrived at his tenth-floor Boston office and sat down to an unhappy task. He peered out his window at the Charles River and the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sighed, and picked up the phone.

NEW YORK - With poor investment management, the mutual fund industry has opened the door for alternative products like Web folios, separately-managed accounts, and exchange-traded funds, according to John Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group of Malvern, Pa. However, with a return to sound management based on the fundamental principles of investing, mutual funds should be able to fend off these challengers, he said. Bogle spoke here last week at a forum on use of the Internet in financial services sponsored by Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass.