Money Management Executive Latest News

Complex derivatives are unnerving that part of the accounting industry that audits mutual funds.

Think of it as the mutual fund industry's version of Revenge of the Nerds.

It was only a matter of time before someone created an interactive mutual fund.

Many funds have made the technological leap, allowing fund investors to vote their shares via the Internet in addition to allowing votes in person, by phone, fax and by mail.

Regulators, competition and technology are starting to put pressure on mutual fund companies to examine what they pay broker/dealers in commissions for their funds' trades.

International markets need not be overly complicated, industry executives plan to tell their peers this week at a panel on selling funds overseas at the Investment Company Institute's Tax & Accounting Conference to be held in San Diego, Calif.

TORONTO - Badly slumping sales in the Canadian fund industry have put pressure on small and mid-sized firms, leading to a round of mergers. Through the first eight months of 1999, three well-known companies and their respective founders have struck deals to be acquired by larger independent firms. All three takeover targets and their acquirers are based in Toronto, where most of the industry is concentrated, and all of the merged firms remain in Canadian hands.

BUENOS AIRES - Five years after their inception, and while there are still some two million potential clients yet to be converted from the old state system, Argentine pension fund management companies (AFJPs) seem to have lost some of the aggressiveness that characterized their debuts. Instead, they appear to be concentrating their commercial strategies on developing the loyalties of the members they already have in their portfolios.

Jeffrey Lyons, senior vice president of mutual funds for Charles Schwab & Co., of San Francisco, recently spoke to Mutual Fund Market News reporter Mike Garrity about trends in fund distribution and product development. Lyons is one of the speakers on those topics at the Investment Company Institute's Tax & Accounting Conference beginning today in San Diego, Calif. An edited account of their conversation follows.

When international stock markets shut down, as they did as a result of the Aug. 17 earthquake in Turkey, U.S. fund managers can be sent scrambling for a new method of pricing their funds in order to keep them operating.