Mutual funds

J. & W. Seligman & Co. of New York is planning to offer four new mutual funds. The funds - the Seligman Time Horizon 30, Time Horizon 20, Time Horizon 10 and Harvester funds - are asset allocation funds. Seligman described its plans in a registration statement filed with the SEC Aug. 13.

There is a mutual fund product in development that could only be imagined in the age of Cyberspace - a value fund that plans to use Internet message boards to assist individual investors to influence the actions of public companies.

StockJungle.com, a first-time mutual fund adviser, plans to launch four online mutual funds, including a novel S&P 500 Index Fund that will be free to investors.

American Express Financial Advisors of Minneapolis is launching a combined brokerage and mutual fund service in an effort to compete with full-service brokers and mutual fund sellers E*Trade of Menlo Park, Calif., and Charles Schwab Investment Management of San Francisco.

Viking Mutual Funds, a new firm in Minot, N.D., is now offering its first three funds, which the SEC approved on Aug. 3. They are Viking Tax-Free Fund for Montana, Viking Tax-Free Fund for North Dakota and Viking Large-Cap Value Fund.

E*Trade Group of Menlo Park, Calif., filed with the SEC in early August to offer two new funds, one based on e-commerce and a second based on businesses in Europe, Australia, Asia and the Far East.

Oppenheimer Funds of New York recently filed with the SEC to introduce two new funds, the Trinity Growth Fund and the Trinity Core Fund.

Salomon Smith Barney and SSB Citi Asset Management Group of New York have selected First Data Investor Services Group of Westborough, Mass., to provide recordkeeping and administrative services for a new 401(k) program geared for small businesses called (k) Choice.

Taking a tip from its variable annuities, Aetna Life and Annuity of Hartford, Conn., recently introduced a mutual fund that provides a guarantee of principal against a possible market downturn.

Investors of the Firsthand Funds' Medical Specialists Fund are in for a surprise. Kendrick Kam, one of the fund's two portfolio managers and president of Interactive Research Advisors, the fund's adviser, is launching his own investment advisory firm and intends to take the $6 million fund with him.

The future of the mutual fund industry will not be as patrician as its past. The U.S. is becoming less white, and the percentage of homes in which English is the first language diminishes all the time. Minorities like Hispanics and Asians make up an increasing percentage of the population.

E*Trade of Palo Alto, Calif. plans to expand its family of index funds with an Internet index fund. The new fund, the E*Trade E-Commerce Index Fund, was filed with the SEC on July 26. The fund will invest in the stocks in the Goldman Sachs E-Commerce Composite Index, which tracks companies that derive most of their revenue online or sell e-commerce infrastructure.

Allianz Group of Munich, Germany is developing its breadth of financial products in the U.S. and is planning a family of mutual funds to be sold here.

Barclays Global Investors - the giant institutional money management firm in San Francisco - is planning to offer 51 exchange-traded index funds, a lineup that is expected to raise the firm's presence among retail investors and increase competition in a slice of the open-end index fund market.

Texas money manager J. Paul Hamilton is getting into a part of the mutual fund business that does not get a lot of attention - the irrevocable trust business.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter of New York plans to introduce a growth fund that will invest in the companies at which teenagers spend their money.

Nomura IBJ Global Investment Advisors of New York plans to offer by year-end defined contribution pension plans modeled on 401(k) plans in the U.S. Nomura IBJ Global is a joint venture between Nomura Securities and the Industrial Bank of Japan Ltd., both headquartered in Tokyo.

Guinness Flight Global Asset Management has won the license to the Internet Stock Index from internet.com Corp. of Westport, Conn. Guinness Flight has filed with the SEC to create a new no-load fund, the Guinness Flight internet.com Index Fund, which is expected to be available to investors on July 30.

Dow Jones Indexes of Princeton, N.J., has established a new index that will track multi-national companies. The Dow Jones Titans Index will watch 50 of the world's largest multi-national companies. Both John Nuveen & Co. and Nike Securities L.P. are expected to start products that use the index by the third quarter of the year, according to Dow Jones Indexes.

American Century Investments of Kansas City, Mo., has enhanced its quarterly customer account statements to reflect individual rates of return in each customer's personal portfolio, as opposed to providing performance figures for each fund in its family. For instance, if a particular fund has increased 12 percent in the quarter but represents only 15 percent of the investor's portfolio, the statement indicates that fund's contribution to the investor's portfolio is 0.8 percent (15 percent of 12 percent.)