Mutual funds

Mark-to-market accounting has merit, but financial institutions need better clarity on its application for very distressed assets, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said.

Reserve Management has scheduled payments on 12 of its funds, at $1 per net asset value, to begin this week and continue through the week of Jan. 12. Investors in seven of the funds will be receiving all of their money back.

PIMCO has frozen dividends yesterday on six municipal bond funds because the value of their investments is insufficient to cover the funds' debt.

Treasury four-week bills that yield zero percent have attracted $30 billion in assets, the Treasury Department announced. And when investors trade the paper with one another, sometimes they get negative yields. This is just further proof of investors’ keen aversion to risk. Treasury first issued the notes in 2001.

Fidelity Cash Reserves, a $130.7 billion money market fund, is now the biggest mutual fund in the nation, surpassing American Funds’ Growth Fund of America. And Fidelity Investments is no longer the biggest fund company in the nation; Vanguard is.

Fidelity Investments this week launched Fidelity WealthCentral, a best-of-breed wealth management platform touted as one that will transform the way advisors conduct business day to day. The platform integrates portfolio management, customer relationship management, financial planning, portfolio rebalancing and trading into one workstation for RIAs, using various technology from Oracle, Advent, Emerging Information Systems and Northfield Information Services.

Fund bonuses will, undoubtedly, be far lower this year, and with that, a number of managers could look to jump ship, Investment News reports.

Given the fact that this year was one of the worst that mutual funds have ever faced, MarketWatch's Chuck Jaffe has some advice for mutual funds that might startle even the most dyed-in-the-wool manager.

Existing risk tolerance models have done nothing to help investors with any equity exposure this year, and with so many clients’ assets depleted by the market downturn, advisers are trying to find a new way to assess risk. That was one of the key findings of this year’s Retirement Indicator survey, of 212 financial advisers, sponsored by Brinker Capital.

Moody’s Investors Service has affirmed the long-term A1 senior unsecured debt rating for FMR, parent company of Fidelity Investments. Moody’s said that the broad offerings of FMR—including mutual funds, particularly fixed income and money market funds; brokerage services; and benefits administration—and its strong leadership position in each of these industries, should help it weather the economic meltdown.

Fidelity Investments has created a credit card in partnership with American Express that allows customers to transfer rewards from retail purchases to their individual retirement accounts.

Citing steep redemptions and continued market declines, Fidelity Investments Chairman Ned Johnson indicated the firm’s 7% layoffs, or loss of 3,000 jobs, could surge if conditions worsen, the Boston Herald reports.

By overturning a lower court’s dismissal of a case against former Columbia Funds executives James Tambone and Robert Hussey, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is permitting the Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with its market-timing lawsuit against the two men.

David R. Holst, 43, a mortgage broker in Tucson, Ariz., pleased guilty of fraudulently collecting $350,000 from mutual fund investor clients and recklessly, illegally gambling the money, the Arizona Daily Star reports. He accepted the charges of securities fraud and filing a false income tax return.

Personal financial columns are beginning to warn investors that fund fees could rise in 2009, as mutual fund companies try to grapple with fewer assets under management.

Despite some doomsayers predicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average could fall to 7,000 or lower, most of the speakers at the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit said that the market has probably hit bottom. That said, they don’t see volatility going away anytime soon.

Buttressed by favorable interest rates and investors looking for shelter from falling equity prices, U.S. fixed annuity sales set a new quarterly record. Total U.S. sales of fixed annuities rose to an estimated $27.1 billion for the third quarter, according to a Beacon Research study of 51 insurance companies representing 87% of the market. Sales were up 54% from last year's third quarter, and up 10% from the previous quarter, marking the highest sales since the study began in 2003.

PNC Global Investment Names Wolcott President

Seeing traffic on Yahoo's finance website and Marketwatch.com burgeon, Fidelity Investments has decided to try its hand at financial news for itself by revamping its website.

The Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations at the Securities and Exchange Commission reminded fund companies that with all of the staffing and operational cutbacks taking place, compliance is an area where shortcuts cannot be tolerated.