Special Program Root Tag

AST Trust Co., a division of New York-based American Stock Transfer and Trust, has started 10 collective exchange-traded funds for retirement plan sponsors, the company said Tuesday.

Charles Schwab Inc. reported Tuesday that it expects its fourth-quarter earnings to be lower then what was previously expected, Reuters reports. The company projects that profits will be 14 cents per share, opposed to the expected 16 cent per share previously expected by Reuters Estimates.

Evergreen Investments announced Tuesday that beginning Dec. 1, it will begin imposing a performance fee on the Evergreen Large Cap Equity Fund. Since the fund aims to outperform its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index, the newly offered fees should match more closely to the fund's objective, Evergreen said.

The Salomon Brothers Fund settled with shareholders who were opposed to Citigroup's $3.7 billion swap with Legg Mason by transforming into a traditional mutual fund from a closed-end fund, Dow Jones reports.

The Salomon Brothers Fund settled with shareholders who were opposed to Citigroup's $3.7 billion swap with Legg Mason by transforming into a traditional mutual fund from a closed-end fund, Dow Jones reports.

JPMorgan Worldwide Security Services, the fund services giant of New York-based JPMorgan Chase, has launched a new business unit that will offer a complete line of outsourced fund administration services to private equity firms and institutional limited partners.

Although all's been quiet on the Social Security front lately, the G.O.P. might be planning to push forward reform that would likely include President Bush's controversial private accounts, according to the National Post in Washington.

With the changing of the guard at the $50.6 billion, flagship Fidelity Magellan Fund, mutual fund analysts have been busy speculating what direction its new portfolio manager, Harry W. Lange, will bring to the poorly performing behemoth.

Citigroup Asset Management says that Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs) are poised for a growth spurt, despite the fact that only one of five investors currently takes advantage of their benefits, which includes tax optimization and account customization.

Despite the impressive performance of the dollar in recent months, most everyone on Wall Street is calling for a decline in the greenback in 2006, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Judge Samuel A. Alito, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, responded to criticisms that he should have recused himself from cases involving Vanguard and Smith Barney, saying he had no financial interest in the two companies, The New York Times reports. He said that they simply managed some of his investments.

The class-action lawsuit against the mutual fund industry over market timing and late trading is slowly inching toward a settlement, The Baltimore Sun reports. A series of rulings by three judges in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore drastically cut the number of legal claims against mutual fund companies and brokerages.

With capital gains taxes this year expected to reach levels unseen since the tech boom, ironically, there are a number of mutual funds that are poised to post big profits but tiny tax bills to their investors.

A bill recently introduced in the U.S House of Representatives would force mutual fund complexes and other financial services companies to improve the security of sensitive financial consumer data, and perhaps even require them to provide free data monitoring to investors whose information has been breached.

Abigail P. Johnson, daughter of Fidelity Chairman and CEO Edward C. Johnson III, may not make the cut when her father retires, according to an opinion piece in Business Week. Ned Johnson says that because he has no immediate plans to retire, he has not chosen a successor, and should he be unable to make a decision on the matter, then company guidelines will decide.

At the inaugural CCOutreach National Seminar, held last Monday at the Washington headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox spoke about compliance issues faced by chief compliance officers, and the role these compliance professionals play within in their firms.

A bi-partisan committee tasked with simplifying the Federal tax code recently delivered a pair of recommendations to the U.S. Treasury Department, but if the reception they've received from the money management industry serves as any indication, they're bound for a pitched battle on Capitol Hill.

Fees and expenses incurred by investors who buy mutual funds have been declining since 1980, and that continued into 2004, according to a new report from the Investment Company Institute of Washington.

John Hancock Financial Services has launched a new multi-million dollar advertising campaign to bring attention to its expanded fund lineup and strong brand in the marketplace.

Putnam Investments, one of the first companies to be embroiled in the mutual fund trading scandal, continues to pay the price for its involvement, as investors yanked another $1.8 billion from the fund complex in September, bringing its net outflows year-to-date to $15 billion. Putnam is now the ninth-largest U.S. mutual fund firm.