Special Program Root Tag

Julie Domenick, an Investment Company Institute employee for 23 years who currently serves as its executive vice president, is leaving to become managing principal of the Washington firm of Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey, the ICI announced.

Mutual fund assets worldwide rose to $13.96 trillion at the end of the fourth quarter, an increase of about 9% from the previous quarter, according to annual data Tuesday from the Investment Company Institute.

A subsidiary of Wachovia Corp. is being investigated over payments it received from mutual fund companies, and another may soon be charged with conflicts of interest involving stock research and investment banking, Reuters reports.

Low fees and solid performance are not guarantors of future results, according to a newly published Lipper study, The Wall Street Journal reports. The odds of picking winning equity funds are slim, according to the Lipper report, which found that more than 70% of all domestic actively managed domestic stock portfolios during the past decade lagged performance benchmarks set by the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Paul Roye, director of the division of investment management at the SEC, announced that former T. Rowe Price counsel Nancy M. Morris brings needed mutual fund expertise to new post in his unit.

Janus Capital Group is telling the Securities and Exchange Commission about its relationships with brokers.

Ned Johnson, the chairman of Fidelity Investments, is taking a staunch stand against the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to make an independent chairman mandatory on all mutual fund boards, the Financial Times reports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has signaled that additional regulation for hedge funds is needed to protect wealthy individuals and retirement funds that invest in alternative investments, the Associated Press reports.

The hits just keep on coming.

Separate studies by Equilar, a compensation specialist, and investment consultant Management Practice have both found that directors' salaries mostly held their ground and in some cases inched up in spite of high-profile regulatory probes of corporate boardrooms. Median salaries of trustees at the nation's 50 largest fund families grew by 13% last year to $128,000 from $113,000 in the previous year, according to Management Practice. Growing criticism of trustees who were charged with accepting lofty salaries to rubber stamp requests by management to raise fees paid by investors has failed to shame trustees into taking pay cuts, according to both reports.

Despite the market-timing troubles at its mutual fund unit, Massachusetts Financial Services, which has settled with the SEC for a total of $410 million, Sun Life Financial announced a 7% profit for the first quarter against last year's numbers.

Ever wish you were somebody else? Well, thieves have been making it happen at a more rapid pace, hijacking the identities of mutual fund customers and other patrons of the financial services industry and reeking havoc at an alarming rate.

"For every benefit you receive, a tax is levied" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

With chatter about deflation and a jobless recovery abating, the investment outlook for the rest of the year will be dominated by inflationary concerns and the quality of corporate earnings, according to several executives at US Bancorp Asset Management.

Putnam Investments last week announced it is improving the fee disclosure in Putnam CollegeAdvantage, the 529 plan it runs in Ohio, and also reducing the plan's annual maintenance fee.

The director of research at Morningstar has advised investors to sell four mutual funds in the research firm's weekly "Fund Spy" column.

Fidelity Investments has announced a new program that will give the financial advisers who sell its 401(k) products better ways to inform those who invest in the plans.

Auerbach Joins ICI to Lead Financial Services Policy

Assets in investment products, including mutual funds, commingled funds, institutional separate accounts, as well as annuity sub-accounts in defined contribution plans, are expected to exceed the $1 trillion level by 2010, according to new estimates by Financial Research Corp. of Boston. At year-end 2003, these assets, which FRC refers to as the "investment-only defined contribution market," totaled $400 billion.

When fund firms tell investors they should not use past performance as an indicator for future results, they should believe it, said Andrew Clark, a senior analyst at Lipper.