Mutual funds

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.

MassMutual Retirement Services of Springfield, Mass., has revamped its web site with a sophisticated calculator for its defined contribution and defined benefit customers. The calculator automatically lifts information on client accounts out of various MassMutual records into an analytical engine capable of processing various scenarios for a shareholder's retirement. Also, the calculator stores whatever new information the customer supplies to it. The calculator can even automatically re-balance a shareholder's portfolio.

The investment adviser to the Internet Fund - a portfolio that returned better than 300 percent for the 12-month period ending Jan. 31 - is considering opening a new fund.

Deutsche Fund Management has introduced the DB Americas Bond Fund, a fund that will concentrate on fixed-income securities in the Americas and the Caribbean. The fund will be offered to non-US residents. Deutsche Fund Management will sell the fund through its own and other private banking groups around the world.

State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) is offering a new fund which will invest primarily in companies whose employees are members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). The SSgA IAM Shares Fund will invest approximately 66 percent of its assets in IAM-represented companies. The IAM represents 734,000 working and retired members.

John Hancock Funds has begun offering level-load shares for nine more of its mutual funds, bringing to 21 its funds with this pricing option. Instead of charging a sales commission at the time of purchase or when the shares are redeemed, level loads spread the cost over time.

John Nuveen & Co. of Chicago has introduced an investment portfolio of ten companies based on Fortune magazine's "America's Most Admired Companies" list. Fortune compiles this list of ten outstanding companies each year, interviewing more than 10,000 analysts, top executives and board directors to ask them their opinions of companies' financial soundness, long-term investment value and use of corporate assets. Fortune also looks for outstanding innovation, product or service quality, management quality and employee talent.

SunAmerica Asset Corp. has introduced the Tax Managed Equity Fund, designed to produce high total returns and low taxes by using an optimization model developed by sub-adviser J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan first began offering this strategy of reducing capital gains taxes to high-net-worth clients in the 1980s. Steven Neamtz, executive vice president of SunAmerica Asset Management, believes investors will increasingly look to minimize after-tax returns.

The IDS Mutual Fund Group, the proprietary mutual funds of American Express Financial Corporation, wants to change its name and increase some fees it charges investors.

The Mutual Fund Education Alliance will hold its seventh annual marketing seminar in San Francisco October 18-19th. The Alliance is based in Kansas City, Mo.

Vanguard has introduced the Tax-Managed Small-Cap Fund, a no-load fund aimed at reducing taxes by investing in a diversified portfolio of low-cost, small-capitalization stocks that promise long-term capital growth and nominal current income.