Special Program Root Tag

Testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last Thursday on the role of hedge funds in the credit crisis, five prominent hedge fund executives said they would be in favor of establishing a public exchange or clearinghouse for credit default swaps (CDS) to make the market more transparent.

Federal Reserve Delays Purchases of Money Funds' Short-Term Debt

LAS VEGAS - Lately, fund marketing and technology executives feel as if they have been bombarded with a barrage of data from their customer relationship management (CRM) systems, but their biggest challenge is finding quick, easy and cheap ways to access that data and make it relevant.

With investors moving so much money into cash and cash-equivalent instruments to avoid the continually downward spiraling stock market, it has never been more important in the history of modern investing for mutual fund companies to reach advisers and investors with forceful yet honest messages about the value of long-term investing and areas of the market that are safe, outpacing benchmarks or, perchance, even delivering positive returns.

LAS VEGAS - A recession may seem like an odd time for a renaissance in technology, but the need to cost-effectively share information and brainstorm for solutions has never been greater.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will not revisit 12b-1 fees by the end of the year, Andrew Donohue, director of the division of investment management, told Reuters.

The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets is looking at ways to better understand and regulate derivatives and credit default swaps, which essentially are insurance on corporate debt.

Assets in U.S. money market mutual funds rose by $21.28 billion in the week ended Nov. 12, for a total of $3.637 trillion, the Investment Company Institute said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will vote at its Nov. 19 meeting next week on a provision to allow shortened mutual fund disclosure statements.

Testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee onThursday on the role of hedge funds in the credit crisis, five prominent hedge fund executives said they would be in favor of establishing a public exchange or clearinghouse for credit default swaps (CDS)to make that market more transparent.

The fate of many a hedge fund relies on what investors decide to do with their money on Nov. 15, when it is possible an overwhelming majority could ask for their money back by the end of the year, Dow Jones reports.

A record $156.5 billion was withdrawn from mutual funds in Europe, according to the Lipper FMI report. All asset classes suffered net withdrawals. By comparison, U.S. mutual funds have lost $100 billion year-to-date, according to AMG Data Services.

Referring to today’s stock and corporate prices as bargain basement, the chief executive officer of Aberdeen Asset Management of the U.K. said he is interested in purchasing other companies, particularly hedge funds-of-funds and private equity firms, Reuters reports.

“There will be profound changes in the way investors look at the world going forward,” Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb told Reuters.

Hedge funds lost only 3.9% in October, but overall, in the third quarter, they lost 16% of assets, ending at $2.497 trillion, due to heavy investor redemptions, according to a Wednesday report from HedgeFund.net.

Charles Schwab on Wednesday unveiled an eight-step plan to help people prioritize both their short-term and long-term savings objectives.

Of the 130,000 jobs that have been lost at financial services firms since the middle of last year, most have been at banks and brokerage firms. Mutual fund companies, so far, have held up because they’ve been buttressed by ongoing fees from customers retirement savings. In 2007, fund companies lost only 1.6% of their workforce, or 2,723 jobs.

A systems administrator who was laid off on Nov. 5 from an unnamed mutual fund company in New York wasn’t happy enough with the severance package the company gave him, Computerworld reports.

Money market mutual fund managers holding onto short-term debt they are unable to unload into the market will have to continue to hold on tight, because the Federal Reserve is not going to extend its $540 billion in loans to purchase the paper through the Money Market Investor Funding Facility until next month.

It’s not just plain-vanilla equity funds that investors are bailing out of. In the past two months, investors have redeemed 16% of assets from exchange-traded notes, bringing assets under management from a peak of $7.3 billion in June to $3.9 billion today, The Wall Street Journal reports. The rest of the decline is due to falling prices in commodity and currency ETNs.