Special Program Root Tag

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, held a hearing on Wednesday to discuss the impact hidden fees in 401(k) plans can have on investors’ retirement savings.

In a bid to drive sales, Fidelity will introduce a family of team-managed funds overseen by former Magellan manager Robert Stansky, The Wall Street Journal reports. Each member of the eight-member team will specialize in a sector, and they are expected to be the cream of Fidelity’s crop. While Magellan didn’t fare well under Stansky’s helm, he is well regarded as a good manager of other people.

To voice its dissatisfaction with extraordinarily high executive severance packages and director absenteeism, Fidelity’s votes against trustee nominations have increased from 5% in 2006 to 13%, Bloomberg reports. Fidelity withheld votes for at least one director at 229 companies this year, compared with 70 in 2006. Besides protesting excessive golden parachutes, Fidelity withheld votes for directors who failed to attend 75% of board meetings.

Speaking to reporters at a conference on securities fraud, Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, said insider trading has become “rampant” on Wall Street and that the Commission will be bringing more cases, Reuters reports.

Based on its assessment of fund companies’ customer loyalty, ownership, revenue and equity of brand, Cogent Research has released a ranking of those poised for the greatest future growth, with Vanguard taking the lead position and Fidelity coming in at No. 2.

In pursuit of more stable returns, wealthy investors are increasingly embracing less-traditional asset classes, such as derivatives, private equity and hedge funds, and moving away from equities, index funds, bonds, annuities and real estate, according to a Barclays Wealth survey of 790 high-net-worth individuals around the world.

Investors in socially responsible funds aren’t hit with a “performance penalty,” according to a report from the United Nations.

Due to strong gains this year, particularly in foreign, small-cap and value funds, and the depletion of losses from the last bear market, some experts believe mutual funds’ taxable distributions will be the highest on record, The Wall Street Journal reports.

It appears that hedge funds are set to take in a record amount of flows this year, as year-to-date they have amassed $164 billion, well ahead of the $126 billion they took in during 2006, according to Hedge Fund Research.

Already, 130,000 people have lost their jobs on Wall Street, and there’s still two more months to go, BusinessWeek Online reports. That’s well ahead of the record 116,000 who got the pink slip in 2001. By comparison, only 50,000 lost their jobs last year.

The FINRA Investor Education Foundation has granted $432,850 to the National Bureau of Economic Research to examine whether disclosure can help investors better evaluate risks and fees.

Fidelity Investments has launched a new Web-based platform for registered investment advisers. Called WealthCentral, it is designed to combine the various functions and tools that RIAs need, including financial planning, portfolio management and customer relationship management.

The Department of Labor has decided not to include stable-value funds as one of its recommended default options for 401(k) plans under the Pension Protection Act. Instead, the DOL will make it easier for sponsors to select balanced funds, lifecycle funds and a professionally managed, diversified portfolio as the default choices.

Schroeders is in the early stages of planning to expand into India and reportedly in talks with a number of possible partners. Already, however, the firm has recruited SV Prasad from Zurich Financial Services, where he was president of the Indian division, to serve as managing director of the new venture.

The distinction between mutual funds and hedge funds is becoming increasingly blurry, since many mutual funds are turning to using such hedging tactics as short selling, leveraging portfolios and investing in options, South China Morning Post reports.

Standard & Poor’s has launched the S&P Select Frontier Index, which will invest in 30 of the largest and most liquid companies in frontier markets, including emerging Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East. It is a subset of the S&P Extended Frontier 150 Index.

With the departure of 13 veteran portfolio managers from Janus over the past year, many young analysts at the firm have been promoted, Rocky Mountain News reports.

Forty-seven percent of Americans find investing confusing, and it’s particularly true for women (56%) as opposed to men (38%), according to a survey of 669 investors commissioned by Bankrate.

Mutual fund managers who lived through the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, when the market plunged 22.6%, remembered the lessons learned, including the importance of seeking an outside point of view—particularly when the market is soaring, having a contingency plan and educating investors, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Although her bosses at Canary Capital characterized market timing and late trading as mere “skimming,” hedge fund manager Noreen Harrington said she thought it was “grand larceny” and decided to blow the whistle because she knew it was harming individual investors, the Edmonton Journal reports.