Special Program Root Tag

California pension giant CalSTRs said Thursday that it has fired Putnam Investments as money manager as the noose around the embattled fund firm tightens.

Michael Buchanan, the Janus High-Yield Fund portfolio manager, said he is quitting after a mere five months on the job. Originally Buchanan came to Janus Capital from New York-based investment firm BlackRock Inc. to replace Sandy Rufenacht as manager of the fund. Buchanan will leave the firm Dec. 19 and will be replaced by Gibson Smith, manager of Janus' short-term bond products and assistant portfolio manager of the Janus Flexible Income Fund. Smith will continue to run the Janus Short-Term Bond portfolios.

The spate of investigations into mutual fund trading practices and intense media coverage has prompted more than one-third of existing mutual fund investors to say they are unlikely to buy mutual funds any time soon, according to a survey conducted by The Lumin Collaborative, a Richmond, Va.-based PR firm. Further, 77% say they would pull their money from any fund they believed violated its fiduciary responsibility.

Boston Private Bank and Trust Co. has hired former Boston Bruin hockey star Derek Sanderson from State Street Global Advisors as a vice president and senior investment professional, to help it develop a line of business managing wealth for professional athletes.

WASHINGTON - If the fund industry thought it already had enough legal headaches from Fundgate, its next problem could be a profit squeeze.

Survivor: Mutual Fund Island. Which CEO will be the next to go? Many have taken the plunge already, but those who can outwit, outplay and outlast will be off the hot seat.

For the past four years, I've been a senior vice president handling wholesaling for AllianceBernstein in the New York metro region, the fifth-largest SMA provider in the nation. During that time I've managed to attract about $3 billion in new accounts. I've been fortunate to work in an area that has seen a great deal of growth in high-net-worth individuals.

Alliance Capital has named an independent chairman of the board of a number of its funds, according to an SEC filing last week.

Security Trust Corp., the Phoenix-based firm whose three top officials were charged with felonies by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, will be shut down effective March 31, 2004.

State Street Names Barry Large-Cap Value Fund PM

Mutual fund managers are tipping their caps to interim chief John Reed as the New York Stock Exchange preps itself for a makeover. But industry lobbyists suggest that the proposed governance structure fails to provide adequate representation.

Closed-end funds are on pace to close out a record year of asset raising.

Salomon Brothers Asset Management said that the Salomon Brothers Emerging Markets Debt Fund began trading on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday. The new fund offering is a non-diversified, closed-end fund that will focus primarily on total return with high current income as a secondary objective, the New York fund manager said.

Quantitative Advantage, a Minneapolis-based money manager that specializes in separately managed accounts, announced Tuesday that CheckFree APL will be its administrator in that sector.

Four of the nation’s largest public pension funds are going after the board of directors of Putnam Investments’ parent company Marsh & McLennan Companies for its "failure to properly control its money management business and for its severe lack of independent board leadership," the funds announced in a joint statement on Monday.

Merrill Lynch said it will return about $11 million to investors that did not receive certain discounts when purchasing Class A Shares, The New York Times reports.

It has been a tough week for Invesco. Just one day after New York, Colorado and federal regulators sued the Denver-based firm for improper trading, airwaves in Denver tossed around the question of whether the Invesco name should be erased from the Denver Broncos’ stadium title, Reuters reports.

The New York State Insurance Department has issued reserving guidelines for guaranteed minimum living benefits offered through variable annuities. The Department sent out a letter at the end of October regarding the application of Regulation 128 to those guarantees.

Index annuity sales were down 3% in the third quarter over the same period last year, according to the quarterly Advantage Group index sales survey. Sales were down 13% over the second quarter of 2002, with half of carriers reporting a drop.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted 5-0 yesterday to propose that mutual fund companies no longer receive any trade orders after the 4 p.m., or appropriate, market close. This would mean tremendous change to the way fund companies accept and process orders, since intermediaries handle 87% of these orders.