Investment funds

A record $156.5 billion was withdrawn from mutual funds in Europe, according to the Lipper FMI report. All asset classes suffered net withdrawals. By comparison, U.S. mutual funds have lost $100 billion year-to-date, according to AMG Data Services.

Referring to today’s stock and corporate prices as bargain basement, the chief executive officer of Aberdeen Asset Management of the U.K. said he is interested in purchasing other companies, particularly hedge funds-of-funds and private equity firms, Reuters reports.

“There will be profound changes in the way investors look at the world going forward,” Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb told Reuters.

Hedge funds lost only 3.9% in October, but overall, in the third quarter, they lost 16% of assets, ending at $2.497 trillion, due to heavy investor redemptions, according to a Wednesday report from HedgeFund.net.

Charles Schwab on Wednesday unveiled an eight-step plan to help people prioritize both their short-term and long-term savings objectives.

Of the 130,000 jobs that have been lost at financial services firms since the middle of last year, most have been at banks and brokerage firms. Mutual fund companies, so far, have held up because they’ve been buttressed by ongoing fees from customers retirement savings. In 2007, fund companies lost only 1.6% of their workforce, or 2,723 jobs.

A systems administrator who was laid off on Nov. 5 from an unnamed mutual fund company in New York wasn’t happy enough with the severance package the company gave him, Computerworld reports.

Money market mutual fund managers holding onto short-term debt they are unable to unload into the market will have to continue to hold on tight, because the Federal Reserve is not going to extend its $540 billion in loans to purchase the paper through the Money Market Investor Funding Facility until next month.

It’s not just plain-vanilla equity funds that investors are bailing out of. In the past two months, investors have redeemed 16% of assets from exchange-traded notes, bringing assets under management from a peak of $7.3 billion in June to $3.9 billion today, The Wall Street Journal reports. The rest of the decline is due to falling prices in commodity and currency ETNs.

Van Kampen Funds on Tuesday launched the family of Van Kampen Retirement Strategy Funds. The nine target-date funds, with target retirement dates in five-year increments between 2010 and 2050, plus a fund for those already retired, are based on investment strategies determined by Russell Investments and are designed to provide broader diversification and lower risk than other target-date funds.

American Century this week will inform 17% of its workforce, or 270 employees, that they are being let go due to the aftershocks of the credit crisis, declining assets due to redemptions and falling stock prices, and declining investor confidence and a weakening economy.

While the average equity mutual fund is down 48% and the average hedge fund is down 20% so far this year, one uncanny hedge fund manager, Bernard V. Drury of Drury Capital, has posted incredible year-to-date gains of 60%, The New York Times reports.

Curian Hires Ramsier as Divisional VP for the West

Reserve Funds has begun making distributions to shareholders of its Primary Fund at an initial rate of 50 cents on the dollar, and its president said the company plans to pay the rest soon.

Direxion Funds hopes that with credit tight, eight 300% leveraged exchange-traded funds it is offering, both on the long and the short side, will resonate with investors. However, while the funds could deliver tremendous returns, they have an equal shot at big losses.

ICI Forms Money Fund Working Group

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to begin working on passing an economic stimulus package even before he takes office.

PALM BEACH, Fla. - Capturing 401(k) rollovers has been top of mind for mutual fund companies for years. Now, with billions of dollars flowing out of equity funds, $682 billion in September alone, mostly into cash, capturing 401(k) rollovers and moving money out of cash and safe bets back into equities is the name of the game.

Long-short money managers have been breathing a sigh of relief with the end to the Securities and Exchange Commission's ban on short sales of financial stocks. The three-week SEC ban on the short sale of some 1,000 financial stocks that ended Oct. 9 had wreaked havoc among money managers.

Indicating that it is the first of at least two job cut waves to come, Fidelity Investments announced Thursday it will eliminate 2.9% of its 44,400 workforce, or 1,300 positions, by the end of the month. A second layoff, the size of which has yet to be determined, will occur in the first quarter of next year, Fidelity said.