Money Management Executive Latest News

Liberty Funds Group of Boston announced that it is merging the equity trading functions of its mutual fund groups - Stein Roe Mutual Funds of Chicago and Colonial Management Associates of Boston - so that trades for both fund families will be done from one central location.

Prudential Investments of Newark, N.J. has named Lynn Waldvogel as executive vice president and head of marketing. In this role, Waldvogel will oversee brand development, advertising, product marketing, consumer and shareholder marketing, creative services and market research. Waldvogel joins Prudential from PaineWebber of New York, where she served as director of marketing communications.

Several largely unrelated factors are causing mutual funds and the firms that advise them to become more active in the corporate affairs of the companies in which the funds invest.

The Social Security Administration has begun mailing retirement benefit statements to all working Americans - an event that is bound to unnerve individuals ill-prepared for retirement and create tremendous sales opportunities for mutual funds, according to industry executives.

It is no coincidence that Merrill Lynch Asset Management of Princeton, N.J., was the first fund company to offer U.S. dollar-denominated funds to Australian investors only three months after the Australian government eliminated taxes on unrealized capital gains on U.S. funds in June. (MFMN, 9/27/99) Merrill had actively lobbied for that law and was eagerly awaiting its enactment, said Charles Sickles, director of sales for global mutual funds at Merrill.

A nasty proxy fight should draw closer to a conclusion Friday when the shareholders of the closed-end Portugal Fund vote on a series of proposals which could convert the fund to an open-end structure and give closed-end fund activist Ronald Olin a seat on the fund's board of directors.

At a time when the Internet is so important, mutual fund companies cannot afford to misuse their technology budgets.

Auditors of mutual funds may shortly have new guidelines for when personal investments in mutual funds are permissible.

The former chief investment officer for Mitchell Hutchins Asset Management of New York has agreed to pay $10,000 to settle SEC charges that she failed adequately to supervise a portfolio manager's investment and securities pricing practices.

Forty-three percent of those polled by Yankelovich Partners of Norwalk, Conn., are familiar with the idea of socially-responsible mutual funds, up from 30 percent in 1996. And, of those who know about socially-responsible funds, 25 percent have money in such funds, up from 14 percent in 1996, the firm's survey found.