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Will the growing number of settlements between disgraced fund companies and regulators put pressure on other fund advisors to slash fees, too? MFS, Putnam Investments, BoA and Alliance, the latter with a staggering 20% reduction over five years valued at a quarter of a billion dollars, have paved the way to what has become the industry's $64,000 question.

Too many investment advisors and their partners rely on market indexes as the way to judge performance for clients. The shift to a scenario approach may be the best thing you can do.

In his seminal book "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe wrote of those engineers and test pilots who believed in the 1940s that the sound barrier was a "brick wall" that would cause anyone who attempted to break it to "augur in" and "buy the farm." Chuck Yeager, of course, proved them to be wrong.

Managers should not benchmark the performance of their growth and value portfolios to the Standard & Poor's or Barra growth and value indexes, a recent study in the Journal of Investment Consulting maintains. The reason? The benchmarks are flawed.

In rapid succession, several market-timing mutual fund cases have come and gone since Gary Pilgrim and Harold Baxter and the Wayne Pa.-based firm that bears their name, Pilgrim Baxter & Associates, were charged with fraud and skirting fiduciary responsibilities by regulators in mid-November, yet the case is still unresolved.

The SEC charged Gary Pilgrim and Harold Baxter, as well as Pilgrim Baxter & Associates, with "fraud and breach of fiduciary duty" in connection with a market-timing scheme at the PBHG funds, back in mid-November. Pilgrim, then-president, investment chief, and director of Pilgrim Baxter, as well as the president of the PBHG funds, and Harold Baxter, CEO and chairman of the firm and chairman and trustee of the PBHG funds, resigned the day of the charges.

For Ben Franklin, nothing was certain but death and taxes. While those certainties remain, parents of college-bound teenagers now face another sure thing: the staggering and ever-increasing cost of paying for higher education.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. said Friday it would create a new investment advisor called Veritable, LP, comprised of PNC Advisors executives. To start it up, the $6 billion consulting arm of PNC's Hawthorn unit will be sold to Veritable, which will be privately held.

The editors of Money Management Executive want to know how Fundgate has affected your sales environment, customer service approach and communications at your firm.

Just four days after settling with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission on charges of improper trading, FleetBoston mutual fund arm Columbia Management Group said Friday that three of its top executives "will not be returning" to the office, Reuters reports.

Fidelity’s call for trading cost itemization and subsequent pan on soft dollars could hit small firms hard, experts tell Reuters. And a smaller playing field could make the industry less competitive, they say.

Stable-value products, generally used by investors who cannot tolerate market losses, continued to garner attention at MetLife last year, despite an upswing in the stock market. The company grew its stable value assets by $1.5 billion dollars in 2003, with assets totaling nearly $19 billion.

The deal to sell Safeco Corp.’s life insurance unit to a group of investors led by Berkshire Hathaway and White Mountains Insurance Group would bring a new player into the bank-annuity marketplace but probably does not foreshadow major changes.

NASD Probes Out-of-State 529 Plan Sales:Six Firms Suspected of Misleading Investors on Tax Benefits

NASD is probing six large securities firms for their 529 college savings plan sales practices, The Wall Street Journal reports today. Although the article does not name the six firms, and NASD’s Web site makes no mention of the probe, NASD Vice Chairman Mary Schapiro told The Journal that an "overwhelming majority," typically 90%, of 529 plans sold by the six firms are sold to out-of-state residents. The NASD is investigating whether these are appropriate sales, Schapiro said, because nonresident investors "potentially lost one of the great benefits of buying a 529 plan: state tax deductability" of contributions.

Four of the country’s biggest state pension funds are backing off their push to place directors on the board of Marsh & McLennan, parent to Putnam Investments, the quartet said on Thursday.

The cozy relationship between mutual fund boards and management more is likely to take center stage in future investigations by securities regulators since eight directors at Bank of America's Nations Funds were removed as part of a landmark $675 million settlement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the SEC, according to a Wall Street Journal expose.

The SEC is eying a new regulation that may force Edward "Ned" C. Johnson III, chairman of Fidelity Investments and its mutual funds' trustees, to relinquish one of his senior titles, The Wall Street Journal reports.

To earn themselves big bonuses, portfolio managers are more concerned about their firm’s profitability and drumming up new business, than they are how well they do by shareholders’ returns, The Wall Street Journal reports today.

A mutual fund expert from Lipper predicts that more than 20 additional companies may come under investigation in the fund scandal, Reuters reports.