Special Program Root Tag

Even as the Securities and Exchange Commission conducts a federal investigation into conflicts of interest and rebating practices of 401(k) plan administrators nationwide, industry sources say that employers could help themselves by being more careful when setting up plans with administrators, according to the Spokane Journal of Business.

Fidelity Investments is starting up a new entity to serve institutional clients and other non-mutual fund business. The company has not yet announced a name or management team for the new business, however.

Alliance Capital Management Holding L.P. and Alliance Capital Management L.P. have entered into settlement discussions with the National Association of Securities Dealers about previous sales practices and disclosures concerning directed brokerage commissions in Alliance Capital's mutual fund distribution unit.

Asia may not see a sizeable domestic asset management industry for a long time, owing to Asians' reluctance to invest, asset management executives said during a panel discussion at a hedge fund conference in Hong Kong on Monday, according to Reuters.

Canadian mutual fund companies face tough competition from other avenues as the hype of the 1990s bull market wears down, the Financial Post reports. With greater affinity toward high-yielding instruments such as income trusts and structured products, Canadian investors are likely to pull the plug on mutual funds.

New Jersey regulators on Tuesday revoked the licenses of three former Merrill Lynch brokers accused of fraud for conspiring with a hedge fund to make tens of thousands of market timing trades.

The mutual fund business is likely to undergo tremendous change in the years ahead, according to Don Putnam, co-founder of investment bank Putnam Lovell NBF Securities. In an interview with MarketWatch, Putnam said that in light of the changing regulatory environment and mounting conflict-of-interest concerns, the mutual fund industry is ripe for mergers and acquisitions.

Despite suffering massive outflows in recent years, Janus Capital Group's chief investment officer, Gary Black, is confident that the company will make a turnaround by year-end. In an interview with Reuters, Black said the company has undertaken several efforts to improve performance.

The chief executive officers of 14 major pan-European asset and fund management companies have teamed up in a new forum to push their case for a single EU cross-border investment market, Reuters reports.

Janus Capital Group has shut down its Bay Isle Financial office in Oakland, Calif., and cut nearly its entire institutional money management team, including co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bill Schaff, leaving the future of the subsidiary hanging in the balance.

PALM DESERT, Calif. - Paul Schott Stevens says his organization isn't advocating the establishment of personal retirement accounts as a solution to the looming Social Security shortfall, but the Investment Company Institute president has heard quite enough of what he calls "misleading" and "pessimistic" rhetoric.

The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to get its CCO Outreach program underway in late spring to early summer in an effort to better communicate and coordinate with mutual fund chief compliance officers, Chairman William Donaldson told attendees at the Investment Company Institute Mutual Funds and Investment Management Conference.

Merrill Lynch has reached a $13.5 million joint settlement with state regulators and the New York Stock Exchange over charges that it failed to supervise a group of financial advisers who engaged in abusive market timing of the firm's mutual funds.

The national office of the AFL-CIO has persuaded Waddell & Reed to join Edward Jones in withdrawing from a lobby group that supports President Bush's proposal to reform Social Security through private accounts, and now the organized labor giant has set its sights on Charles Schwab.

Janus Capital Group has shut down its Bay Isle Financial office in Oakland, Calif., and cut nearly its entire institutional money management team, including co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bill Schaff, leaving the future of the subsidiary hanging in the balance.

To hear former Bank of America broker Theodore C. Sihpol III's account of what led to his arrest in September 2003 on charges of fraud, an event that set the entire mutual fund scandal in motion, he was an unwitting, bit player among more crafty financial managers who worked a late-trading conspiracy within a gray area of what the industry considers legally and ethically acceptable.

Victor Ugolyn, 57, the former chairman, president and CEO of Enterprise Capital Management of Atlanta, the adviser to the Enterprise Group of Funds, the proprietary fund family of insurance company Mutual of New York Group (MONY), has a brand new gig these days.

Bank of America Corp. will outsource back-office operations for $224 billion of assets to Boston-based State Street Corp. and Boston Financial Data Services, a joint venture of State Street and DST Systems.

AIG-Huatai Fund Management, a Shanghai-based joint venture between AIG Global Investment and Huatai Securities, began selling its first mutual fund in China last Monday. The company hopes to capitalize on the long-term investment potential of China's capital market and will launch more fund products for Chinese investors in the next couple of years. Investors in AIG-Huatai's equity fund are likely to have greater investment choices as more companies are expected to be listed domestically this year.

Lipper, a leading provider of mutual fund information and a wholly owned subsidiary of Reuters, announced last Tuesday that it has purchased the rights to acquire Hedgeworld and the TASS Research database. The company did not disclose the purchase price.