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Vanguard announced Monday a new one-stop shop for financial planning, which will be free to existing clients with $250,000 or more and to those who bring $100,000 of new assets to the Valley Forge-based company.

The nation's insurance industry would rather that the Securities and Exchange Commission did not adopt amendments to the redemption fee rule that the regulator proposed in February.

Westwood Management will soon launch a new large-cap value fund. The fund will be a separate string of the Dallas-based firm's Advisors' Inner Circle Fund, according to a report from Dow Jones.

Talk to Chuck about turning around a flagging discount brokerage.

Morningstar recently released its top picks for equity funds that not only perform well but also are shareholder friendly, and now the Chicago fund tracker has applied the same metric to determine the industry's best fixed-income products.

As the mutual fund industry continues to battle back from the scandal, popular sentiment is that investor confidence is rising. But don't count former Business Week writer Gary Weiss among the faithful and don't even get him started about hedge funds.

For a good time, put 5% of your assets in non-index "fun funds," says Vanguard Group founder and investor advocate, Jack Bogle.

After lagging performance led to massive outflows from its flagship Magellan fund, Fidelity Investments is closing two other large funds to new investments before they too get unwieldy. The news, which the firm announced late last week, comes on the heels of its recent announcement that it would be also be closing the $63.8 billion Fidelity Contrafund, currently the company's largest, to new investments.

First Trust introduced the first exchange-traded fund to track U.S. initial public offerings last week, but investors should think carefully about when they choose to buy in, according to MarketWatch columnist Mark Hulbert.

Janus Worldwide and Janus Overseas are a pair of funds that, as Morningstar analyst Kai Wiecking observes, once moved in unison. Now the two funds couldn't be more different, and it's rather interesting to see how they've evolved through the bull market of the late 1990s, the tech crash and the ensuring bear market to where they are today.

Vanguard founder John C. "Jack" Bogle is urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to require mutual fund companies to better disclose how much top executives are paid in salary, bonus and perks, in a letter he sent to regulators on April 10.

Janus Capital Group has appointed fund industry veteran and former AllianceBerstein executive Mark Baltimore to head its global broker/dealer unit.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has named Andrew "Buddy" Donohue, Merrill Lynch's global general counsel, as the director of its division of investment management, a position that has been filled by two interim managers since Paul Roye's departure in March 2005.

The NASD has filed a complaint against A.B. Watley Direct and its former representatives Robert Conway and Kenneth Ng for facilitating late trading and improper market timing of mutual funds on behalf of hedge fund clients. In addition, ABW Direct President Robert Malin and Executive Vice President Linus Nwaigwe were charged with lapses in supervision. ABW Direct is a subsidiary of A.B. Watley Direct.

A U.S. Court of Appeals has dropped the independent chairman rule back in the Securities and Exchange Commission's lap, but whether the legal circus surrounding the controversial mandate is nearing an end is anyone's guess.

Drowned by the din of arguments surrounding rules for independent directors and chairmen of mutual fund boards is the increasingly important role of another independent party: attorneys.

Back at his alma mater, school officials introduced him as a man who "lives ethics on a daily basis."

Although the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Edward Jones for $75 million in 2004 for not disclosing revenue-sharing agreements with a select group of mutual funds, the brokerage has continued the practice, and quite profitably. Last year, Edward Jones reaped $172.3 million in revenue-sharing fees from its "preferred" list of mutual funds, more than double previous years, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

Many investors do not realize that fund fees are important when making investment decisions, and instead are swayed by prospectus information even though they sense they are making a mistake, according to the Yale School of Management.

AIG's General Counsel Joins Pillsbury Winthrop