The mutual fund fees known as 12b-1s have morphed into something few envisioned when the SEC created them 25 years ago. With regulators now poised to address that transformation, many reps are sweating about the future of a reliable income stream...

Looking for a good fund that won't nickel and dime clients? Russ Kinnel, a mutual fund analyst at Morningstar, recently ranked the five-year, asset-weighted relative performance of prominent fund families, adjusted for loads. He admits that it's a...

Anyone wondering whether the regulators had lost interest in mutual fund marketing need wonder no more. With the SEC and NASD recently levying more than $80 million in fines to five firms (for transgressions related to revenue sharing and B shares...

As one A.G. Edwards financial advisor sees it, regulators and broker/dealer management have gone overboard with mutual fund disclosure. Take the case of the B-share class of mutual funds. Right now, B shares are the baddest guys on the Street, the...

Quick: Guess how much money investors in Putnam Investments mutual funds were cheated out of in the market-timing scandals. Hint: It wasn't the $110 million Putnam agreed to pay the SEC and Massachusetts's regulators. An academic, hired by Putnam...

Most of the cash flowing into exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has focused on a few big funds, especially ones that track popular benchmarks, such as the S&P 500. Such funds are excellent choices for advisors seeking a core holding for clients. But...

FundAlarm.com may not be a household name, but the Web site, founded by Roy Weitz in 1996, has an influence more powerful than the 125,000 user hits the site receives a month, (about a third of them are on the site's discussion boards). It is a...

The market may have been flat for much of 2004, but it didn't affect investors' enthusiasm for mutual funds. Total assets in the nation's mutual funds grew by $177.5 billion, or 2.2 percent, to $8.1 trillion in December, according an Investment...

Investors have been flocking to foreign stocks, and for good reason. But there is also good reason to remain wary of overseas investments. During the first 10 months of 2004, international funds had inflows of $83 billion, a record pace and more...

The SEC's requirement that mutual fund boards be stocked with more independent executives met with jeers when it was passed last year. Now, the raspberry blowers have some research to back up their disdain. Missouri University's School of...