Gray Matter
Sep 01, 2005
When the mutual fund scandals broke in September 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and other politicians described the misdeeds in black-and-white terms. According to the original story line, the villains were mainly mutual funds who...
NTFs are No Free Ride
Aug 01, 2005
In the 1980s, Charles Schwab changed the way investors shop for funds, introducing the supermarket. The innovation's main attraction was its ease of use. Investors could scan through dozens of fund choices and select the ones they liked best...
A Tough, but Smart Sell
Jul 01, 2005
Plenty of clients detest bond mutual funds, their most common gripe: Why own these never-maturing bonds when the Fed is trying to nudge up interest rates? When interest rates rise, bond funds sink, so in times like these many investors feel more...
The Fund Family That Said No
Jul 01, 2005
American Funds Distributors is the fund company that said no. While in the past few years many funds sued by regulators have been quick to settle, American, the second-largest fund family in the U.S. with $650 billion in assets is fighting back...
Killing It Softly
Jul 01, 2005
Under departing Chairman William Donaldson, the SEC generated plenty of noisy headlines. But one of the Commission's most decisive actions received little attention; it recently eliminated a class of investments: stable value mutual funds. Stable...
On Sale—Sort of
Jun 01, 2005
Price wars have hit a variety of industries recently, including airlines and wireless phone providers. Will mutual funds be next? A few signs of funds discounting have appeared. In April, American Funds slashed expense ratios 10 percent. Earlier...
This Year's Model
Jun 01, 2005
You gotta have a gimmick, Stephen Sondheim advised in the 1959 musical In the song, it's about how to roll them in the aisles at Minsky's. But, mutual fund marketers have made the same calculation, constantly introducing offerings that are...
Will 12b-1 Fees No Longer Be?
May 01, 2005
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...
By the Numbers: The Weight of the Load
May 01, 2005
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...
Scandal Scorecard: Mutual Funds on Top
May 01, 2005
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...
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