Special Program Root Tag

The Securities and Exchange Commission, and not Congress, should and probably will lead the march toward reforms in the morally and legally fragmented mutual fund industry, a key legislator told Reuters.

New research by Spectrum Group finds that many mutual fund investors either don't know or don't care about the industry scandals.

Mark Whiston, 42, the chief executive of embattled fund shop Janus Capital Group, quit and will be replaced by Steve Scheid, 50, the Janus board chairman, the firm announced early Tuesday.

The mutual fund scandal and recently volatile market conditions have failed to halt the industry’s continued runaway growth this quarter.

The buy side is again bestowing buy ratings on mutual fund companies

The Principal is a bit late to the party but its financial adviser marketing and portfolio management systems are finally here

In what could be a blow to the New York Stock Exchange, the Investment Company Institute is expected to say yes to a Securities and Exchange Commission proposal to alter a longstanding trade rule, Financial Times reports.

Standard & Poor's introduced Monday the separately managed account (SMA) Evaluator, a joint venture with tech company Prima Capital that will act similarly to S&P’s mutual fund research tools.

Earlier this month, when the Money Management Institute added Tokyo-based Nikko Cordial Advisors as its first international member, the organization said it hoped the foreign companies would keep joining. Less than a month later, Toronto’s First Asset Advisory Services assured that the MMI’s hopes were realized.

As its fourth fund, Houston-based Commonwealth International Series Trust added a real estate fund earlier this year in order to take advantage of a recently red-hot sector.

If scandalous companies do not receive harsh and quick punishments, they could collectively drill a gaping hole in everything that is good with the U.S. free market system, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said last week.

The $675 million price tag agreed to by new partners Bank of America and FleetBoston to settle charges in the mutual fund scandal was extremely high, but the companies agreed that expeditious handling of the charges were paramount to closing their merger, a vice chairman of BoA said in a recent CNBC interview.

Shareholders of taxable equity funds are losing almost a quarter of potential returns because of taxes, according to a recent research study.

Mellon Financial has agreed to purchase Safeco Trust Co. from Safeco Corp., and the deal is expected to be completed by the middle of next month.

Operational inefficiencies are nothing new for the separately managed account business. In fact, the lack of connectivity between its key players has stunted what has otherwise been rapid growth in recent years.

Separately managed account providers have been making a number of adjustments lately: bolstering and tweaking product offerings, pruning prices, expanding technology platforms and reinvigorating relationships.

First the seminar, then the pitch. The formula is probably as familiar to investment professionals as tea before haggling is to customers in a Turkish bazaar. But a few years ago, Nuveen Investments decided it didn't want to sell their managed accounts like oriental carpets anymore.

Bank of America employees will have to sign a revised code of ethics document as a result of regulators' probe of improper trading at its mutual fund unit.

The SEC voted unanimously last Tuesday to adopt measures to improve the transparency of mutual funds and variable annuities. Beginning Dec. 5, all funds must now disclose what risks, if any, market timing poses for their funds, as well as reveal in their fund prospectuses whether their board has adopted rules against market timing. Should a board have decided such rules are not necessary, it must spell out its reasons why.

Many mutual fund shareholders were pleasantly surprised in April by plentiful embedded losses in their investments. Capital gains paid by mutual funds slumped in 2003 to an estimated $14 billion, the lowest level since 1990, according to a study by the Investment Company Institute. The lengthy bear market also contributed reduced levels of capital gains payments totaling $16 billion in 2002, which dramatically trailed a record $326 billion in 2000.