Special Program Root Tag

It was hard for Morningstar to pick just one Vanguard domestic stock portfolio manager as the category winner in its 18th annual Fund Manager of the Year awards selection. So it picked three. Actually, it had to, considering Vanguard Primecap has three managers.

In what should have been a three-month red carpet rollout to an 80th birthday party, the mutual fund industry is not even thinking of a gala. Instead, it is pondering mistakes of the recent past and reforms for the near future.

Sorting the lint from the clean clothes in the scandalous mutual fund dryer is not as easy as some would lead us to believe. After all, the money attached to enforcement of reforms will come from the jeans pockets of middle-class fund investors.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has subpoenaed a number of leading mutual fund names in the state, his office announced Friday.

Strong Financial told its employees last week it is eliminating its 2004 pension plan contributions and ditching its matching contribution to employee 401(k) plans, amid a broad push to lessen costs at the heavily investigated firm.

Banc of America Securities, the securities and asset management unit of Bank of America, may face civil action from the SEC stemming from trading activity in the firm’s San Francisco office.

Ameritrade is finally seeing the fruits of its labor, especially when it comes to its Advisor Services division.

Even before Fundgate took the industry by storm, critics were calling into question the use of 12b-1 fees. And now regulatory action appears imminent.

Given the shocking developments that have come to the fore in the mutual fund scandal this past year, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the stock market is on a tear.

If you sell brick houses, and the wooden houses next door catch fire, it's natural to see a marketing opportunity in your future.

Curian Capital will offer its managed account program through Security Service Investment Group, a unit of Security Service Federal Credit Union that distributes its investment products through a network of credit unions in San Antonio, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, Colo.

Fidelity Investments, the National Securities Clearing Corp. and a group of fund companies and broker/dealers have partnered in a yearlong project to develop the technology to time-stamp mutual fund trades. They are hoping that by time-stamping trade orders that come via outside intermediaries, only those orders made by the so-called "hard 4 p.m." close will be allowed to get through - thus eradicating illegal late trading.

A former attorney turned Las Vegas hedge fund manager has reaped the biggest gains so far in the unfolding mutual fund scandal, the SEC charged.

A.P. "Skip" Viragh, the founder of Rydex Funds, died at his Sarasota, Fla.-home on Dec. 11 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 62.

Vintage Mutual Funds has named James Mackay as its new president and CEO. Mackay is currently serving as the president of the Investors Management Group, the investment adviser and administrator for the Vintage Funds.

My primary concern remains that Congress, and to a lesser extent the SEC, will rush forth some "cure-all" measures, rules, regulations and laws that are poorly conceived, perhaps along the lines of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Roy Weitz, publisher of fundalarm.com, and Jack Bogle, founder, Vanguard Group, faced off last May on some of the problems the two outspoken critics have found rife in the industry (see inaugural issue of Money Management Executive 5/19/03).

Assets under management in the mutual fund industry grew by $82.4 billion, or 1.2%, to $7.235 trillion in November, according to the Investment Company Institute.

Most of the mutual fund scandal’s widest ranging investigations have been into fund firms themselves, but now the Securities and Exchange Commission is concentrating on the more prominent faces that help run these companies: Fund managers. Specifically, the Commission wants to see if the managers traded improperly with their own companies’ shares.

The Financial Services Authority, a London regulatory agency, said Tuesday it will not speak out on soft fees or bundled brokerages until March, according to Dow Jones Newswire.