Money Management Executive Latest News

Although index-funds have long been touted as the fund choice of the buy and hold investor, the net outflow of assets in the Vanguard 500 fund is evidence of an underlying fickleness on the part of index investors, said Daniel P. Weiner, editor of the Independent Adviser for Vanguard Investors.

LEESBURG, Va. - The Old Economy is meeting the New Economy in this sleepy Virginia town where the headquarters of America Online, MCI, Exodus and high-tech Internet start-ups nestle amid rolling green hills, bales of fresh hay and the estates of Virginia blue bloods.

American Century Investments of Kansas City, Mo., could land a windfall of 401(k) business as a result of the merger between J.P. Morgan & Co. and Chase Manhattan Corporation, both of New York, said a spokesperson for American Century.

Executives Alliance Capital Management of New York, T. Rowe Price Associates of Baltimore and other mutual fund companies must be rooting for a George W. Bush victory in November's presidential election if they believe what Prudential Securities analyst Charles A. Gabriel Jr. has to say.

Philip Goldstein, closed-end fund activist and principal of Opportunity Partners, a private investment partnership of Pleasantville, N.Y., said he wants to tone down a proxy he filed late last month in which he implies that members of a Dresdner fund board are too old and too rich to represent shareholder interests.

Although net sales of long-term funds declined substantially in July, fund analysts downplayed the decline and said the fund industry would quickly rebound.

Five million more Americans have become mutual fund shareholders during the past year, bringing total mutual fund ownership to 88 million individuals in 2000, according to the Investment Company Institute. That number is up from 83 million in 1999, according to the ICI.

SunAmerica of New York will air its first television commercials for its mutual funds this week, a company spokesperson said.

The PBHG Small Cap Value Fund and the PBHG Mid-Cap Value Fund are available to 401(k) clients of Dreyfus Retirement Services and Scudder Kemper Retirement Services, according to Pilgrim Baxter & Associates of Wayne, Pa. Pilgrim Baxter is the investment adviser to PBHG Funds, a family of 17 no-load mutual funds.

Seventy-five percent of parents with children five-year-olds or younger have begun to save for their children's future college expenses, according to a survey commissioned by Fidelity Investments of Boston. Forty-three percent of them started saving before their child was born, the study found. This is a significant shift from ten years ago, when the average parents of college-bound children said they did not start putting money away for college until their children were seven years old, the study found.