During the 1990s, Tom Marsico made investing look easy. As manager of Janus Twenty, Marsico recorded huge gains while limiting his portfolio to two dozen stocks. The fund often held well-known stars such as Lucent Technologies and Pfizer. Plenty...
During the late 1960s, best-selling author Adam Smith called Fidelity Investments the Green Bay Packers of the mutual fund world. Just as Green Bay dominated professional football, Fidelity attracted a record following because of growth-oriented...
No one likes paying taxes, but clients get extra steamed when they are blindsided by a particularly hefty IRS bill. Unfortunately, such tax surprises could become increasingly common for shareholders of municipal bond funds. The source of the...
A new study of mutual fund firms' enforcement capabilities affirms what many in the industry have known for some time omnibus accounting practices by fund intermediaries make catching timers virtually impossible. The study, conducted by the...
If there is safety in numbers and comfort in size, fund investors are now putting their need for reassurance on parade. The growth-stock fund companies that raked in the bulk of new dollars in the late 1990s (Janus, Putnam Investments and Alliance...
Soft dollars is a heavily debated topic these days, particularly among the fund managers who shoulder the commissions load. A new study from The Journal of Portfolio Management asked chief investment officers at 72 asset management firms what they...
In the late 1990s, academic researchers began noticing an interesting but disturbing side effect of the roaring bull market: 401(k) investors consolidating their investment positions. Specifically, instead of diversifying their portfolios, many...
How can you build the ideal portfolio? For many advisors, the answer can be summed up in one word: Markowitz. In the 1950s, Harry Markowitz changed the financial world by describing how diversification could help investors control risk and achieve...
Don't tell Brandywine Fund that fleeing stocks for cash is a safe, conservative maneuver. In 1997, at the outset of the greatest bull market of all time, Brandywine had a disastrous experience with a move to cash when it concluded that the markets...
It's common knowledge that mutual fund shareholders lost money in the late-trading and market-timing shenanigans that have recently consumed the fund industry. But shareholders have been losing many times more money over a longer period of time...