Special Program Root Tag

The brokerage subsidiary of H&R Block, the nation’s No. 1 tax preparer, said it could be punished for improper mutual fund trades, Reuters reports.

Changing jobs can be quite a hassle for most new employees; deciding what they should do with their existing 401(k) plan could be even more time-consuming, not to mention confusing.

Six months after they were named as part of the opening-round, Canary Capital portion of the mutual fund scandal, Bank One’s One Group funds are no longer sell material, a Morningstar analyst said on Friday.

Unregistered hedge fund Global Money Management (GMM) overstated its assets to investors and should be shut down immediately under emergency relief procedures, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a filing Friday. A California judge partly granted the Commission’s wish on Friday by issuing a temporary restraining order against the company.

The SEC this week formed a special committee to help determine whether 529 college savings plans offered through mutual fund companies and brokerage firms are overcharging investors.

CalPERs, the nation’s largest pension fund with $167 billion in assets, on Monday adopted a standard code of ethics for its outside money managers and consultants.

Mutual fund shareholders who bought Vanguard’s actively managed mutual funds earned greater returns and incurred less risk than others who held onto the firm's coveted index mutual funds during the same 27-year period ending Dec. 31, according to an study in the upcoming Journal of Portfolio Management.

U.S. equity funds suffered their biggest performance decline since September 2002, falling 4.02% in the week ended Thursday, according to a research report from Lipper.

While other fund companies are beginning to gingerly say no to soft-dollars from brokerage firms, Massachusetts Financial Services has put an all-out ban on the practice, claiming to be the first fund company to make the move, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Dance partners Bank of America and FleetBoston Financial, whose merger is days away from a shareholder vote, yesterday to a $675 settlement, which will also see eight members of BoA’s Nations Funds board step down and the firm exit the securities clearing business. It is the largest settlement to date in the ongoing fund investigation.

Embattled fund manager Janus Capital Group announced Monday that Gary Black, chief investment officer for Goldman Sachs Asset Management ’s global equity business, has been named president and CIO of Janus.

The U.S. Attorney’s office yesterday unsealed a criminal charge complaint against Mutuals.com, charging three executives at the firm with helping hedge funds deceive mutual fund companies by hiding their market-timing activities in separate accounts, The Wall Street Journal reports. Mutuals.com said it is "vigorously" contesting the charges.

The National Association of Securities Dealers has slapped its first fine on a brokerage firm for violating NAV transfer program procedures.

WASHINGTON -- Flexing their muscles, Securities and Exchange Commission officials from around the nation told a group of lawyers here that while cooperation with regulators is essential, the bar has been raised in terms of penalties and no firm will avoid getting its medicine.

The fund industry scandal has cast market timing, and frequent trading as bad news for mutual fund investors. But when the "timers" are actually fund portfolio managers whose dizzying spinning in and out of securities is eagerly embraced as a part of their core investment strategy, is the news still bad for investors, or is outperformance the result?

With exchange-traded funds rapidly becoming more mainstream investment vehicles, a debate has emerged over how to maximize their tax-efficiency capabilities.

As legislators and regulators prepare to adopt more stringent regulation governing the mutual fund industry, some investment advisors will benefit from such rule changes while others will be harmed, according to Fitch Ratings.

Barclay's Global Investors (BGI) is launching nine new exchange-traded funds based on the Morningstar style box methodology, a move that will bolster its already dominant position in the ETF space. Barclay's owns more than 65% of the market share in the ETF business.

Warren Buffet, in his widely anticipated annual to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, blasts fund companies that cheated millions of investors through market timing and late trading, as well as directors who fell short of their duties. Funds are in dire need of "truly independent directors" willing to fire investment managers who overcharge on fees or fail to put shareholder interests first, Buffet said in his report. CEOs of fund companies are grossly overpaid, he added, holding directors, themselves richly paid, to blame. Buffet also referred to the sale of Strong Funds, without naming the firm, as "a travesty." The real "acid test" of whether current investigations into Wall Street will lead to meaningful change, Buffet said, is whether firms are willing to bring the pay scales of their chief executive officers back down in line with reality.

MFS Investment Management has hired a new chief counsel and a compliance officer to oversee corporate governance and compliance procedures in the wake of its $350 million settlement with regulators last month.