Money Management Executive Latest News

Gabelli Asset Management of Rye, N.Y has announced that it has completed a first stock buyback program and has extended it.

The Liberty Acorn Funds will extend until April 30, the modified sales charge schedule on sales of class A shares on all five of its mutual funds. Liberty Wanger Asset Management of Chicago manages the funds. The extension was disclosed in a March 1 fund prospectus amendment filing. Through April 30, investors may purchase class A shares at a reduced sales charge of two percent, while brokers and other intermediaries will be paid a four percent commission. Consequently, Liberty Wanger will pay half of that commission from its own pockets.

Stephen W. Sullens has been named vice president of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management Group of New York. Sullens was director of Citi Alternative Investment Strategies, the hedge fund investment center of Citigroup of New York.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Market volatility has quickly diminished some funds' returns and may require those funds to advertise more recent performance data than that of the most recent quarter's, said Doug Scheidt, associate director of the division of investment management of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Council of the European Union will vote today on a proposed amendment to the 1985 UCITS Directive, the legislation which regulates the coordination of laws, regulations and administrative provisions relating to UCITS funds, or Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities. If the amendment is adopted, it will have a substantial impact on funds and fund companies in Europe, providing fund companies with considerable flexibility in cross-border business, according to analysts.

Fund Democracy, a shareholder advocacy group in Chevy Chase, Md., wants the Securities and Exchange Commission to tighten its policy on granting funds exemptions that remove shareholders' rights to vote on changes of sub-advisers and sub-adviser fees.

Empirical evidence collected from a variety of shareholder surveys suggests that mutual fund shareholder redemption activity is not nearly as worrisome as the 40.9 percent rate of redemptions recorded in 2000 might indicate, according to a report issued last week by the Investment Company Institute.

Data on net flows in variable annuity sales will be available beginning in October, according to the National Association for Variable Annuities and Info-One of Campbell, Calif. NAVA, of Reston, Va., and Info-One announced last year that the two companies would jointly begin collecting net flow data on variable annuity contracts. NAVA will ask its members to provide this data to Info-One/ VARDS using a standardized format developed by NAVA, according to Info-One. While mutual fund companies have reported sales on a net flow basis for years, annuity issuers have not reported analogous sales information.

Defined contribution retirement programs have seen rapid expansion over the past decade. But, defined contribution business will be undergoing a slowdown, as alternative investment options increase, market returns decline, and retiring baby-boomers begin to remove assets, according to a study released last week by Strategic Insight, a mutual fund research and consulting company in New York, and NewRiver, an online financial service provider in Andover, Mass.

The Investment Company Institute of Washington D.C. earlier this month asked the New York Stock Exchange to make changes to Institutional XPress, the trading system for large orders by mutual funds and other institutional investors that the exchange began using last June.