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Those who participated in market timing during the recent mutual fund scandals are being punished by redemption fees or even told to stay out completely, according to The Wall Street Journal.

A former Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce employee currently serving a two-year conditional sentence for committing a $20 million fraud involving mutual fund clients has been sentenced to one year in jail by a Canadian court.

Thirty years after their introduction, separately managed accounts are now popular enough to almost be considered mainstream, CBS MarketWatch reports.

Personalized features and friendly user interfaces helped Fidelity Investments, American Century and New York Life win "excellent" designations from Boston-based Dalbar for the market research firm’s second quarter 2004 analysis of mutual fund Web sites.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s deputy director of the Division of Investment Management – and a major player in the agency’s attempt to fix the mutual fund industry – is leaving her position there to take on a role as senior vice president and compliance executive for securities regulation and conflicts management at Bank of America.

Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. and financial advice provider GuidedChoice announced Thursday that they are providing customized advice to participants in more than 100 plans administered by Schwab Retirement Plan Services Inc.

A Colorado federal judge Thursday rebuked regulators and Invesco for failing to reach a swift settlement over charges that the mutual fund firm coordinated an improper trading scheme, Rocky Mountain News reports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said that while still an employee, Warren Lammert, who left Janus Capital Group in March 2003, brought a hedge fund into the company’s mutual fund pool and allowed it to time the market, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Setting a precedent for itself, The National Association of Securities Dealers will not allow a Seattle-based firm to open mutual funds for new clients for 30 days, citing the company’s allowance of improper market timing trades.

Northern Trust Global Investment Services plans to expand its wealth management, asset servicing, asset management, fund accounting and hedge fund administration businesses internationally. Stephen Potter, the head of Northern Trust's international market segment, said the company plans to expand in markets such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Nordic region, both by opening regional offices and making strategic acquisitions.

Federal securities regulators churned out two more mutual fund reforms last week as directed-brokerage practices were officially junked and portfolio managers met with new standards for disclosure.

In the midst of the largest scandal in its 80-year history, and as a spate of new regulatory requirements gets underway, the mutual fund industry faces a major overhaul in the way it distributes funds.

WASHINGTON -- While the annuity industry remains hush-hush on the topic of the market-timing cases being brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General, this silence does not indicate a lack of opinion. Speakers and attendees alike voiced their views on the brewing market-timing trouble and regulatory implications for the variable annuity industry here at the Regulatory Affairs Conference sponsored by the National Association for Variable Annuities of Reston, Va. And the consensus was that preventing market timing in annuities is more complex than preventing it in mutual funds.

For its alleged part in a market-timing scheme, Van Eck Associates, which advises the Van Eck Funds, and two of its executives may be facing Securities and Exchange Commission charges, the company indicated in a filing. The news is far from surprising, since the firm has a lot of international funds that trade in different time zones. As the latest in a long list of high-profile companies named in the scandal, including Putnam Investments and Janus Capital, the announcement by Van Eck represents another step down in what seems to be a never-ending stairwell of charges. As Morningstar Director of Fund Analysis Kunal Kapoor put it, "It's been more widespread than most folks would have imagined."

The Securities and Exchange Commission hit Angelo Haligiannis and his Sterling Watters Group hedge fund with an emergency enforcement action for lying to investors about performance, complete with false documents, prospectuses and marketing materials. The fund's general partners, Sterling Watters Capital Advisors and Sterling Watters Capital Management, were also named as defendants.

Following the Mutual Fund Directors Forum's "best practices" could spell a bad reality for investors, a number of independent research firms argue in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Rollover Goes With Clark As Vice President of Sales

Participants in 401(k) plans saw their account balances grow by more than 29% last year, evidence that despite a difficult bear market in previous years, investors are still turning to the vehicle as an effective way to save over the long-term. This is according to a recent study released by the Investment Company Institute and the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Participants in Manulife USA lifecycle funds have reaped higher returns on their investment in the last five years than do-it-yourself asset allocations, a recent survey conducted by investment consulting firm Burgess + Associates shows.

Calvert this week has named Catherine Palmer Roy, a former senior portfolio manager and head of the U.S. fixed-income group and a senior portfolio manager at Baring Asset Management, as chief investment officer of its $6 billion fixed-income department.