Money Management Executive Latest News

If a mutual fund company's return on an advertising campaign could be measured in terms of growth in assets under management, then the five-year-old print ad campaign of Putnam Investments of Boston has delivered a 256 percent return on investment.

WASHINGTON - If the test for success for new regulations is that they contain a little something to annoy just about everyone, the SEC staff has hit a home run with the rules it has proposed for mutual fund directors.

Mutual fund executives are taking stock of what expanded trading hours could mean to their back-office operations.

It was not a resounding victory for those who want to job hop, but top executives who formerly worked at State Street Global Advisors of Boston have been allowed to join a competitor despite a non-compete agreement SSgA contends prohibited the move.

Mutual fund companies with high-net-worth clients will soon find new competition from an online hedge fund company that hopes to remove the mystique surrounding hedge fund investing.

Liberty Funds Group of Boston stood out from the crowd recently when it merged the equity trading desks of its two mutual fund companies, Stein Roe Mutual Funds of Chicago and Colonial Management Associates of Boston. Merging equity trading desks is a move that relatively few holding companies with a number of fund affiliates have made.

The military coup that took place in Pakistan on Oct. 9, closing the Kurachi Stock Exchange for one day, caused minimal disruption in the pricing of securities among U.S. fund managers.

Jean-Marie Eveillard, the prominent mutual fund portfolio manager, will remain with the SoGen Funds of New York for at least five years despite Eveillard's sale of his interest in the fund group. Eveillard and Societe Generale Asset Management of Paris are selling the SoGen Funds' investment adviser - Societe Generale Asset Management Corp. of New York - to Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder of New York. Eveillard, who owns about 20 percent of the fund adviser, has signed an employment contract to remain with the fund group as the person primarily responsible for its day-to-day management, according to a proxy statement the funds filed with the SEC Oct. 22. In addition, Arnhold and Bleichroeder will pay Eveillard for his stake over approximately seven years, the proxy statement said. The purchase price for the firm was not disclosed.

A consortium of 15 mutual fund and asset management firms has agreed to boycott the purchase of securities of Mitsubishi International of Tokyo. The group of investment advisers followed the recommendation of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, an advocacy group based in Yarmouth Port, Mass. The fund urged the actions against Mitsubishi because of a proposed salt production plant the company plans to build in Baja California, Mexico that the fund says will harm wildlife.

Index-based investments, from index funds to index-based exchange traded funds, have become so popular recently that a group of investors has created a new web site in the Caribbean that allows investors to bet on the future price of several indexes.