International funds

Fund managers are betting that emerging markets will be the best place for growth in 2010, due to their lack of correlation to the rest of the world and its sluggish, forecasted recovery, but lower correlation does not mean greater safety.

American Century Investments is a brand-new player in the international wealth management business-and that novelty could be an ace up its sleeve, according to the company's top executive.

While it may be too late for the Securities and Exchange Commission to pass any new regulations before the end of the year, financial experts anticipate major financial legislation and regulation to occur sometime in early 2010.

Fidelity Investments is planning to launch a mutual fund focused on companies that will benefit from strong Chinese consumer growth, and famed portfolio manager Anthony Bolton is returning to the company after two years in retirement to run it.

State Street has signed an agreement to acquire Mourant International Finance Administration for an undisclosed amount of cash. Based in Jersey in the Channel Islands, Mourant specializes in fund administration for alternative investments. The deal marks a continued expansion into alternative servicing for State Street. Mourant has $170 billion in assets under administration and 650 employees in locations including Dublin, Singapore and New York.

NEW YORK - Investors and money managers looking to diversify their portfolios by getting into commodities and commodity exchange-traded funds should keep in mind the volatile nature of these products, as well as the wide range of possible risks, experts say.

Van Eck Global has introduced the Market Vectors Poland ETF, an exchange-traded fund that offers investors pure-play exposure to Poland, the world’s 18th largest economy.

Thirty-eight percent of senior mangers around the world believe the economic crisis will end by the second quarter of next year, Atradius found in a survey of 3,500 executives in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The U.S. economy is well on its way to recovery, according to most mutual fund CIOs, and just about all the economic charts show key growth criteria improving, barring an unexpected jolt.

NEW YORK - A little-known provision in international financial reporting standards (IFRS) could require mutual funds to consolidate and report the financials of the companies they invest in, if they own a controlling interest across all of their individual funds.

Affiliated Managers Group has acquired a 5% stake in Value Partners Group of Hong Kong, marking AMG’s first foray into China.

Hedge fund managers tell The Wall Street Journal that the $26 billion that investors have placed in emerging markets funds, $15 billion of that through exchange-traded funds, is creating artificial valuations that could readily lead to a bubble.

T. Rowe Price announced Monday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a 26% stake in UTI Asset Management and UTI Trustee for $138 million. UTI Asset Management, which has $17.2 billion in assets under management, is the fourth-largest asset manager in India and the country’s oldest mutual fund institution.

Asset managers are embracing the UCITS IV directive in Europe, and are turning to master/feeder structures as the number of asset managers and funds decline, KPMG reports.

Noting the urgency and immensity of their task, global financial leaders are frantically making small and large changes to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and international financial accounting standards (IFRS) to make them more similar, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has recently made a single set of standards a high priority.

Fidelity Investments has augmented its international trading platform, enabling retail investors, advisers and brokers to trade foreign stocks and currencies in real time. The platform gives retail investors access to 12 foreign markets and eight currencies, along with third-party research, news, real-time market data and quotes, and telephone access to international trading specialists 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In the six months through September, inflows to mutual funds in Japan rose 27% to $23.5 billion, according to the Investment Trust Association of Japan. In the first half of the year, the average Japanese mutual fund rose 17.2%, according to Nomura Research Institute.

The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Eastern Europe Index Fund began trading on the NYSE Arca Friday.

Jefferies Asset Management has introduced what it believes is the first commodities exchange-traded fund tied to an equities rather than a futures index, and it is planning other equities-based commodities ETFs in the near future.

Dreyfus has introduced two funds-of-funds, the Dreyfus Satellite Alpha Fund and the Dreyfus Diversified Global Fund.