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Former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt told the Evening Standard that the "insurance scandal is really far more pernicious than almost any other scandal of this decade."

The former head of Citigroup Global Investment Management may be punished by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his role in activities under investigation at its mutual fund unit, the company said in a filing with the Commission Friday.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s all-out assault on insurance firms may claim a casualty at the top of the nation’s No. 1 insurer, Marsh & McLennan, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Citing the company’s settlement with federal authorities for charges of improper mutual fund trading, analysts predict a third-quarter loss for the UK firm Amvescap, Reuters reports.

Mutual fund purchases outnumbered redemptions last year by a margin of two to one among fund investors who made transactions, according to a recent report release by the Investment Company Institute. The statistics are part of the Institute’s 2004 Profile of Mutual Fund Shareholders, a survey covering three years that aims to study mutual fund owners’ goals, objectives, risk profiles and views on investing.

Fidelity Investments announced that client assets in its brokerage unit grew 15% during the third quarter. Fidelity Brokerage Co. also increased client accounts by 6% and daily average commissionable trades by 4% from the year earlier.

Third-quarter earnings at Janus Capital Group crept up slightly from a year ago, but much of the gain was due to the exclusion of certain key figures.

A new mutual-fund-like investment vehicle takes the idea of niche investing to an even higher level, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Violts, or Veritcal Investments of Life Sciences Trusts, are unit investment trusts that will invest in companies that try to cure some of the world’s deadliest diseases.

Before its sale to Wells Fargo & Co. is completed at the end of the year, Strong Financial will slash its workforce by 12%, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Before the year is out, the Securities and Exchange Commission hopes to have the problems of late trading and market timing rectified, Dow Jones Newswires reports.

Unsure about their savings, more Americans are erring on the side of caution and rolling back their prospective retirement dates, a new survey shows, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Fidelity Investments has taken another step to help advisers grow their businesses. The company has added new tools to its PracticeMark online marketing program that allow advisers to create customized marketing plans and marketing materials designed to help acquire and retain clients.

Over 900 advisers have helped Schwab grow its separately managed accounts (SMA) business by 28% to over $15 billion. The number of individual client accounts rose by 16% to over 21,000, with over 900 advisers selling SMAs through Schwab.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has subpoenaed Liberty Mutual Group for possibly questionable sales tactics, The Boston Globe reports. The company is the first in the Boston area to be included in the quickly developing probe into the insurance industry. Last week, Putnam’s parent company and the world’s No. 1 insurer, Marsh & McLennan, was sued by Spitzer for allegedly sending clients off to the insurers that gave it the most money.

TFS Capital, a hedge fund, has launched its first ever mutual fund, the TFS Market Neutral Fund, Hedge World News reports.

The lobbying group for U.S. hedge funds has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to figure out a way to regulate the industry without making registration with the Commission mandatory, The New York Post reports.

Vanguard has lowered the expense ratios on six of its Nevada state-sponsored 529 College Savings Plan portfolios, bringing them in line with the majority of its portfolios in that state’s plan, Vanguard announced Tuesday.

A federal appeals court has denied a request by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to delay new rules requiring mutual funds to have an independent chairman, the Wall Street Journal reports. The world’s largest business group had launched a campaign to postpone more stringent governance measures adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission this past summer pending the outcome of its lawsuit challenging the move.

Regulators are sending a clear message to white-collar criminals: Do not expect lenient punishments.

Clear Asset Management announced Monday it has launched a suite of software-managed separately managed account portfolios designed to "remove Wall Street bias and human opinion" by using software to evaluate more than 10,000 publicly traded U.S. companies. Each of the six equity portfolios of 20 to 25 stocks uses proprietary stock-screening algorithms based on 700 screening criteria apiece.