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Mellon Financial Corporation said Monday that it has agreed to purchase Safeco Trust Company from Safeco Corp., and that the move would be completed within the next 30 days.

Armada Funds last Thursday launched a new Small Cap Core Fund aimed toward aggressive investors, one that will implement an investment strategy combining both value and growth strategies.

The National Association of Securities Dealers said Monday it has censured and fined brokerage firm David Lerner Associates.$100,000 for holding sales contests to promote its proprietary mutual funds and selected variable annuity and variable life insurance products.

Bank of America Corp. 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.

With a return of 0.29% in March, hedge funds have yielded a 3.35% year-to-date return, according to the Hennessee Hedge Fund Index. Despite a drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq and S&P 500, hedge funds still climbed slightly upward.

Real estate funds tumbled 8.33% last week according to Moody’s Investors Service, as investors took cash out of the sector on fears of rising interest rates.

Money market fund assets tacked on $15.27 billion in the week ended April 7, according to industry trade association the Investment Company Institute. That brings their total number of assets up to $2.039 trillion.

T. Rowe Price, the seventh largest U.S. mutual fund company, offered a disappointing first-quarter profit forecast on Thursday, despite projecting an 80% improvement from a year ago. As a result, the company saw its shares drop $1.05, or 1.92%, to $53.52 on Nasdaq.

Royal Bank of Canada has quietly started a U.S. prime brokerage operation in New York to tap into the growing market for hedge fund services. The Toronto company, which calls itself RBC Financial Group, plans to formally unveil the new unit, RBC Hedge Fund Services, as early as this week. It offers settlement, clearing, custody, financing, and reporting services to hedge funds.

EnvestnetPMC has put out an undisclosed bid to acquire Net Asset Management, another Web-based, turnkey provider of separately managed accounts, mutual funds and alternative investments to broker/dealers and independent registered investment advisers. The deal would create the largest independent platform for fee-based advisers in a segment that began consolidating about 18 months ago but has much further to go, an analyst said.

The indictment of former Bank of America broker Theodore C. Sihpol, III last week should sound the alarm for fund executives that those criminally charged in the scandal could spend years locked up with murderers and rapists.

In an effort to break the stifling full-court press being applied by their critics, two tainted mutual fund shops recently launched expansive advertising campaigns stressing their commitment to achieving solid long-term performance for investors.

Psst...wanna buy a registered hedge fund? That's the message that Wall Street Access, a New York brokerage firm that caters to the high-net-worth investor and active trader, is banking on.

Lars Soderberg, executive vice president of institutional services and member of the management committee at Janus Capital, has agreed to take a leave of absence from the company. In the mean time, Janus said, it "will continue to evaluate Soderberg's future role with the company, in light of the ongoing investigation of the mutual fund industry and related regulatory matters."

To spot and stymie potential wrongdoing, pay closer attention to the inner workings of fund management companies, Paul Roye, director of the division of investment management at the SEC, recently told a group of new mutual fund directors.

Employees of maligned fund giant Putnam Investments tiptoed around company procedures in the area of expense payments, several Putnam funds admitted in a series of disclosures to shareholders.

New Prez at Double Alpha; Chender Named to Post

The Great Wall doesn't seem as insurmountable as it once did, as China and its Asian neighbors are rolling back barriers, letting Western companies penetrate their fund markets.

Two Morgan Stanley employees were dismissed last month from a branch office in Baltimore that has recently become the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Associated Press reported.

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. Flagging capital gain payments are the result of previous back-to-back bear market years in which funds racked up sizeable losses.