Mutual funds

Datalink.net of San Jose, Calif., has introduced end-of-day alerts on mutual fund values for 9,600 mutual funds. Datalink.net posts these values at the exact time Nasdaq issues its close-of-market reports, said Anthony LaPine, the company's chairman and CEO.

Mutual fund companies have a new avenue for disseminating their educational materials to investors.

Linklaters & Alliance, an international law firm based in Brussels, is offering a new Internet database, called Blue Flag Funds, which gives mutual fund companies information on starting investment products in other countries.

In response to the ample returns and risks associated with today's market, the Institute for Investment Management Consultants of Washington, D.C, has created software to help its members - investment managers to institutions and individuals - show their customers the risks inherent in their investment strategy.

Standard & Poor's of New York has created a new mutual fund division by merging three units. The units, Standard & Poor's Micropal, Standard & Poor's Fund Research and Standard & Poor's Managed Funds Ratings, will now be known as Standard & Poor's Fund Services. Sanford Bragg will become managing director of the new unit. The move is aimed at accelerating the company's global expansion, Bragg said.

Berger Associates is expanding a joint partnership begun last year to add a retail technology fund to the Berger Funds lineup.

AIM Advisors of Houston plans to launch a fund that will invest in companies it expects will benefit from demographic, economic and lifestyle trends. The fund, to be called the AIM Dent Demographic Trends Fund and to be introduced in June, will be an all-cap growth fund modeled after the teachings of strategic consultant Harry S. Dent, Jr. Through his company, H.S. Dent Advisors, Dent will serve as sub-adviser to the fund.

Charles Schwab Investment Management of San Francisco last week introduced the Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund. The fund is designed to track the performance of the U.S. stock market, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 Index. The index contains nearly every U.S. publicly-traded stock.

Capital Research & Management of Los Angeles last week introduced the New World Fund, a fund that will focus on emerging markets. Capital Research & Management is known as a conservative company and has opened only five new funds since 1990.

NewRiver Investor Communications of Watertown, Mass., has developed Prospectus Express, patent-pending software that would allow mutual fund companies to post prospectuses and other lengthy fund documents in a format that would allow investors to immediately view and retrieve those documents. Other prospectus software allows users to print out documents but not view them online. Prospectus Express also enables users to search within documents for keywords. Currently, that is not possible through the SEC's Edgar database.

AIM Advisors of Houston has introduced Class B and Class C shares for its AIM Large Cap Growth Fund.

Stein Roe Mutual Funds of Chicago has launched the Stein Roe Growth Investor Fund, a no-load, multi-cap growth fund. The fund will mimic the Stein Roe Young Investor Fund, which delivered a 17.65 percent return in 1998. David Brady and Erik Gustafson, who have co-managed the Young Investor fund, will also assume responsibility for the Growth Investor Fund.

Branching into the retail retirement services business, American General Financial Group is creating a family of 23 mutual funds called the American General Fund Group.

Scudder Kemper Investments of Boston has introduced the Scudder Select 500 Fund and the Scudder Select 1000 Growth Fund, two funds meant to offer no-load investors an institutional money management approach. The first fund will be benchmarked against the S&P 500 and the second, the Russell 1000.

Groupama Asset Management of New York, an investment management firm, will launch its first mutual fund, a large-cap growth fund, to gain a broader U.S. customer base for the company. The fund, to be called the GAMNA Focus Fund, is in registration with the SEC. Groupama Asset Management is a division of the French insurance conglomerate Groupama.

Insurance companies are building their mutual fund sales, hoping to take advantage of the increasing interest in these investment vehicles and the pending explosion in retirement savings, industry experts say. Insurance firms are drawing on the strength of their established variable annuity distribution systems to compete with full-service investment houses.

IDEX Mutual Funds of St. Petersburg, Fla., has added five new funds to its family: IDEX T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth, IDEX T. Rowe Price Small-Cap, IDEX Pilgrim Baxter Mid-Cap Growth, IDEX Salomon All-Cap and IDEX Goldman Sachs Growth. The names include the sub-adviser on each fund. IDEX is also including the names of its sub-advisers on the 13 other existing funds in its family.

ProFund Advisors has created two new no-load funds: the UltraEurope ProFund and the UltraShort Europe ProFund. The two funds seek performance relative to the ProFund Europe Index (PEI), which is based on indexes of the markets in Britain, France and Germany. The UltraEurope fund seeks to double the results of the PEI, while the UltraShort Europe seeks to double the inverse of the PEI.

Ranson & Associates of Wichita, Kan. has made a second offering for its Value Line No. 1 Strategy Trust, a Unit Investment Trust (UIT) first offered in January. It has since raised $27.5 million.

The mutual fund family of Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA) of Goshen, Indiana, has become a success story for small funds that invest in socially-conscious ways.