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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
