Money Management Executive Latest News

Franklin Templeton Investments of San Mateo, Calif. and Mercury Funds of New York have formed a partnership in which Franklin Templeton will distribute one of Mercury Funds’ 529 college savings plans, the two firms announced yesterday.

Aquila Management Corp. of New York, adviser to the Tax-Free Fund for Utah, the sole single-state municipal bond fund in Utah, notified shareholders that Zions First National Bank intends to resign as the fund’s sub-adviser sometime before its contract expires in September.

Wiesenberger of Rockville, Md., announced yesterday that it has formed an alliance with UpTick Data Technologies of San Francisco to produce research reports on mutual funds.

Charles Schwab of San Francisco has introduced a new information service on its website designed to make fund research and analysis easier for clients of its OneSource fund supermarket, the firm announced today.

Laura Unger, acting chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, announced in a speech before the Philadelphia Bar Association Friday that the SEC’s staff is working on an interpretive bulletin which will emphasize that technical compliance with Rule 482, the advertising rule, will not protect firms from charges of fraud.

Calvert Funds of Bethesda, Md., the nation’s largest family of ‘socially-responsible’ mutual funds, announced today the launch of the Calvert South Africa Fund, which invests in South African companies that pass a series of social screens and have high potential growth.

The Security and Exchange Commission has proposed changes to rules which govern electronic record keeping.

A decision was overturned earlier this month in the lawsuit Green v. Fund Asset Management, in which shareholders in seven Merrill Lynch funds have sued the company for engaging in fraud with regard to management fees.

Twenty percent of the nation's 37 million 401(k) plan participants who seek outside investment advice, rely on advice from mutual fund representatives, according to a new study from Spectrem Group of Chicago. That is largely because the majority of plan sponsors, 84 percent, offer no investment advisory services to their employees, according to the study. The results of the study were released by Spectrem Group last week.

Paul G. Murphy, a former vice president of Putnam Investments of Boston, was convicted of one count of conspiracy for his part in aiding another Putnam employee in illegally wire transferring $78,909 from an internal Putnam account to another account at the Vanguard Group in Malvern, Pa. in October of 1999, according to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney's office.