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Money market funds provided the major part of a 1.6% boost in mutual funds during the second quarter, according to data the Investment Company Institute released Monday.

Participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans among those between the ages of 21 and 64 slipped this year, but among those who do participate, women outnumber men, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

With the Legg Mason Value Prime Fund up 1.6% through last Friday, versus the S&P 500 up 11.9%, it appears that celebrated fund manager Bill Miller is about to end his 15-year streak of beating the benchmark, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports.

Under a preliminary settlement agreement that plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri, current and former customers of Edward D. Jones would receive an average of $22 apiece, while their attorneys, who work at 11 different law firms, would split $38 million, the St. Louis Daily Record reports.The filing included the $127.5 million the company agreed to pay two months ago when it settled nine class-action lawsuits over its revenue-sharing practices. The firm reached a $75 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York Stock Exchange and NASD in December 2004 over the practices.

Chase Investment Corp. and MetLife Securities both got slapped with a $500,000 fine from the NASD for failing to establish systems and procedures to supervise the sales of 529 college saving plans.

With exchange-traded funds flooding the market, the demand for ETF executives has been rising as well, Dow Jones reports. Likewise, these executives are commanding very competitive salaries.

New York Life Promotes Salama to Retirement Chief

Administrators of 401(k) plans have been strategizing to decide what products to offer and how to capture Baby Boomers assets. According to a new report from Cerulli Associates of Boston, 401(k) providers should consider nine factors: revenue profit potential, outsourcing, technology, customer needs, service and support platforms, consolidation activity, regulatory impacts, rollovers and retirement income, and the cost of total benefits integration.

After a buying push in the past five years to expand nationally, Wilmington Trust said it plans to focus on organic growth to expand its assets before looking to acquire in other wealthy markets.

Vanguard Group is expanding its offerings with the addition of the Vanguard Structured Large-Cap Value Fund, now in registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The new fund, which Vanguard hopes to launch by mid-January, will offer both institutional and institutional-plus shares with investment minimums of $5 million and $200 million, respectively.

Investors beware. The mutual fund industry is gearing up to deliver the largest tax distribution in six years, the third-largest ever, USA Today reports.

Only about 6% of the portfolio managers of exchange-traded funds at the industry’s two largest providers, State Street Global Advisors and Barclays Global Investors, have their own money invested in their funds, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing SEC-mandated data in statements of additional information in fund prospectuses.

Nomura Holdings has agreed to acquire Instinet for roughly $1.2 billion, from Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm that has a 70% stake in Instinet, The Wall Street Journal reports.Silver Lake acquired its stake only 11 months ago for $208 million from the Nasdaq Stock Market. Nomura outbid Citigroup and State Street, sources told The Journal.

Americans are benefiting from the Republican economic policies, so says House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), according to U.S. Fed News.

Investors may be thinking how tomorrow’s election will impact their portfolio, but there probably won’t be much impact at all, according to BusinessWeek. A shakeup in the Beltway probably wouldn’t shake up a well-diversified portfolio, analysts say. “There’s no evidence of a statistically significant relationship between political control of Washington and the stock market,” said Mark Riepe, senior vice president at the Schwab Center for Investment Research, a division of Charles Schwab & Co.

At the request of the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the Government Accountability Office will review two divisions of the Securities and Exchange Commission-the enforcement unit and the office of compliance, inspections and examinations.

LAS VEGAS, Nev.-Since the burst of the Internet bubble, investment companies' enthusiasm for web-based applications and the potential for technology to help grow their business has steadily deflated.

NEW YORK-In the flurry of newly issued exchange-traded, lifecycle and lifestyle funds that have dominated investors' attention in recent years, one product has failed to capture the attention some say it deserves: the closed-end mutual fund.

While value funds have been flying high for the past several years, large-cap growth funds have shown lackluster performance. However, earnings at large-cap companies have been high in recent months, while their valuations have been beaten down, suggesting that the market cycle might be staging a comeback for large-cap growth, said Larry Puglia, vice president at T. Rowe Price of Baltimore, during a webcast last week.

The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Stephen Treadway, former chairman of the equity mutual funds at PIMCO, $572,000 for allowing improper trading of mutual funds. Treadway has also been banned from serving as an officer or a director of a mutual fund company for one year.