Special Program Root Tag

ALPS Fund Services has named John Donaldson chief financial officer.

Colin Moore, who has been head of equities at Bank of America’s Columbia Funds unit since joining the firm in 2002, has been promoted to chief investment officer.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. has streamlined the service it offers to fund companies looking to fund prospectuses. DTCC is also maintaining the information from this system, the Mutual Fund Profile Service, in a central repository that fund companies and their sales partners can reference. It includes such details as investment objectives, fee schedules, contingent-deferred sales charges and blue-sky information and commission data.

Prosecutors have indicted John Tomkins, the self-styled “Bishop” who sent threatening letters to American Century and Janus, including a package containing an unarmed bomb with the message, “Bang! You’re Dead,” the Rocky Mountain News reports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is now accepting registration to its third annual CCOutreach national seminar to guide chief compliance officers, taking place at its headquarters on Nov. 14 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m..

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at mutual fund companies’ trades of securities backed by sub-prime mortgages, the Associated Press reports. The SEC is also taking a close look at the practices of lenders and ratings agencies.

The newest mutual fund that T. Rowe Price has launched, the T. Rowe Price Africa & Middle East Fund, has bet big on Africa, the Baltimore Sun reports. Fully half of the fund’s assets is invested in companies in that nation.

The Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates will certainly boost U.S. markets, but mutual fund managers expect the increase to be even bigger in international markets, Dow Jones reports.

Although Legg Mason established an exclusive sales arrangement for its mutual funds with Citigroup’s Smith Barney brokerage division two years ago when they made their swap, Legg Mason has now renegotiated that in an effort to boost fund sales, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Asset in traditional long-only equity funds will grow a scant 3% by 2010, but assets in 120/20, 130/30 and other types of alternative investments will skyrocket by 141% from $140 billion this year to nearly $2 trillion by 2010, according to a new study from TABB Group.

Evergreen Investments, a unit of Wachovia, settled market-timing charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $32.5 million, and former Evergreen Senior Vice President William Ennis also agreed to pay $150,000 to settle related charges.

Henry H. Hopkins, chief legal counsel at T. Rowe Price for the past 20 years and an employee of the firm for the past 35 years, will be retiring in the spring and replaced by Associate Legal Counsel David Oestreicher.

The Stowers Institute for Medical Research has opened a commercial arm, BioMed Valley Discoveries, whose goal is to produce cures or biomedical advancements that can be used for new drugs, research or startup companies, the Kansas City Star reports.

Hewitt Associates has formed a defined contribution consulting practice to address the full spectrum of concerns of 401(k) plan sponsors, including: plan design, cost and risk management, investment consulting, behavioral finance, administration, communication and legal and compliance consulting.

Standard Life Investments, when reporting a 59% increase in investment sales figures on Tuesday, indicated that it expects demand for absolute-return funds to increase, Reuters reports.

BenefitStreet has launched a new 401(k) platform that can support both mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. It’s a big advancement for 401(k) platforms since traditional 401(k) recordkeeping systems were designed to allow investments in mutual funds, not ETFs or other products that trade whole shares on an exchange. Previously, BenefitStreet offered a separate, ETF-only 401(k) platform.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has contacted the 25 largest mutual fund companies in the nation to inquire about their holdings of mortgage-backed securities, according to Douglas Scheidt, associate director in the SEC investment management division, Bloomberg reports.

Nuveen Investments plans to double its mutual fund assets to $40 billion in the next three to five years, a departure from its previous concentration on institutional and high-net-worth investors, Reuters reports.

Employers are increasingly replacing index funds with more expensive, actively managed funds in their 401(k) plans, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing a study by the University of Illinois and the Federal Reserve Board.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent hedge funds a list of questions they should pose to employees and clients who are privy to information that would constitute insider trading if they were to share it with portfolio managers, the Associated Press reports.