Special Program Root Tag

Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal expects the mutual fund scandal to extend well beyond trading practices and that funds must stand up and make fundamental changes to the way they do business, Reuters reports.

Eaton Vance continues to gain market share and predicts 2003 will be its best sales year ever, and the investment company still has the potential to gain assets withdrawn from some of its scandal-ridden competitors, its CEO said Tuesday.

When Eliot Spitzer accused Wall Street analysts of questionable research practices, Charles Schwab Corp. sought to woo investors by setting itself apart from the herd.

Members of the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (418-2) Wednesday to approve the Mutual Funds Integrity and Fee Transparency Act, also known as the Baker Bill.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow on Tuesday called for swift punishment for individuals convicted in the widening mutual fund scandal, Reuters reports.

Asset management firm Dreyfus will market $4.7 billion in Bear Stearns assets, the companies said on Tuesday, in a deal that could help the firms avoid conflicts from promoting their own funds.

The New York Attorney General’s office has met with Putnam Investments’ former chief of compliance Edward Siedle to discuss a suit he brought against the firm accusing its portfolio managers of self dealing in the 1980s, The Wall Street Journal reports.

WASHINGTON – The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to launch a new risk assessment office dedicated to monitoring the mutual fund industry, Chairman William Donaldson told Congress yesterday.

Investment Company Institute President Matthew Fink told Congress yesterday mutual fund managers who violated securities laws should be jailed.

Several Janus employees who felt that their market-timing practices did not have an adverse effect on investors have left the firm, according to company officials. The company did not disclose the identity of those individuals or the titles they held.

In a move that analysts say shows a loss of faith in the mutual fund industry by its biggest player, Fidelity Investments slashed its holdings from several large fund companies, including ones recently named in the growing scandal, Reuters reports.

While separately managed accounts have gained popularity with affluent investors over the past few years, they do carry some major drawbacks, Wall Street Journal columnist Terri Cullen reports.

Captive brokers may be holding their own with middle-market clientele, but more and more high-net-worth and ultra high-net-worth clients are turning toward independent financial advisers, according to two new surveys.

Janus Capital has replaced Loren M. Starr, president and chief executive officer, with Girard C. Miller, a filing with the SEC Friday indicates.

Even as Putnam Investments reached a settlement with the SEC late last week, Money Management Executive reveals in this week’s issue that going back as far as the 1980s, Putnam had problems with front-running and personal trades by professional fund managers.

An internal review at Charles Schwab found late trading and market timing, the company admitted in its third-quarter filing, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Morgan Stanley as early as today will settle with the SEC for accepting payments from mutual fund companies to sell their products, without properly disclosing this revenue sharing, to customers, The New York Times reports.

Loomis Sayles & Co. may have conducted trades that have market-timing implications, the Boston-based company announced on its Web site Tuesday, Reuters reports.

As the mutual fund trading scandals widened in October, equity funds on the whole had their biggest month of inflows since March 2002, according to the monthly estimate released Tuesday by AMG Data Services (see MME 10/27/03). Investors added a net $24.5 billion of assets to stock mutual funds last month, up from $17.3 billion in September, the scandals' first month.

With investors withdrawing their money from mutual funds, the corresponding stocks within those funds could see their prices plummet. Putnam Investment's loss of $14 billion in the first week of this month forced the company to sell more than $5 billion in stocks to compensate. This type of necessary reaction could hurt the market.