Investments

As Big Brown gets ready for his big day Saturday at the Belmont Stakes, his owners and financiers are already counting their predicted earnings.

Walter Ricciardi, the Security and Exchange Commission’s deputy director of the Division of Enforcement, announced he will retire this month to join the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP as a partner.

Two titans of fundamentally weighted indexes are being compared to the funds they created, in the hopes of stirring up a little excitement.

Joseph D. Kringdon has left his position as managing director, Eastern regional director of sales at Putnam Investments to become executive vice president, head of U.S. retail distribution at Pioneer Investments.

Wells Fargo & Co. and UMB Financial Corp. have each succeeded in the health savings account business, but many of their customers have come through unexpected routes.

Funds that invest in high yield bonds have experienced a rate of inflows unseen for almost five years, according to recently released data.

While data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission shows that hedge funds’ bets against the U.S. greenback have risen by 36% so far this year, Deseret Morning News reports, mutual funds and other institutional investors are raising their stakes in the dollar.

WASHINGTON - Mutual fund companies and their attendant banking channel need to engage the mass affluent, rather than simply chasing the wealthy, if they seriously want to develop their retirement businesses.

Despite strict guidelines and barriers within China, which tend to turn off global fund houses from conducting business, Fidelity International is ready and willing to pursue joint ventures there sometime in the near future.

Advisers are routinely using non-industry websites, particularly YouTube, and bank online in larger numbers than expected, says a new study tracking e-business habits. The findings have implications for asset managers across the industry.

In what some in the industry are heralding as a backhanded acknowledgement of 12b-1 fees, the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering putting a cap on the controversial level-loads.

Allianz Global Investors Taps Nancy Morris as VP

His firm may sponsor only three small exchange-traded funds right now, but if Sean O'Hara, president of RevenueShares Investor Services of Paoli, Pa., has his druthers, there'll be revenue-weighted ETFs in every investor's portfolio someday. With that in mind, the firm will be offering 10 additional sector ETFs within weeks, with more to come later this year.

Welcome to Money Management Executive's 6th Annual Fund Operations Awards.

This Tuesday, June 3, the Senate Banking Committee will consider three nominations to the Securities and Exchange Commission, possibly paving the way for a number of mutual fund measures to be decided upon.

Many mutual fund industry analysts are skeptical that the Securities and Exchange Commission will take final action on any of its outstanding proposals this year, but if it does, the summary prospectus and XBRL tagging are likely to top the list, with a proposal on changes to 12b-1 fees to follow in 2009.

While not exactly a national victory for the mutual fund industry, a recent court ruling regarding "excessive fees" could set a strong precedent for further disputes.

In the midst of market turbulence, many investors are blindly rushing to gold without any concern for the long-term consequences of doing so.

Money market mutual fund assets fell $4.28 billion for the week ending May 28, to $3.505 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute. Assets of retail money market mutual funds fell by $3.99 billion to $1.223 trillion.

NEW YORK—The European Union’s UCITS, or “Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities,” have been gaining tremendous traction throughout the EU, and even Latin America and Asia. Middle Eastern countries are even beginning to warm up to the instruments, as they are tightly regulated by their host countries and designed to protect the end investor.