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 Dogs of the Dow strategy fell from grace in the late 1990s (along with many other strategies overshadowed by Internet stocks), and it has since spent most of its time in the investing doghouse, so to speak. However, having fared surprisingly...
Virtually every major business publication has predicted the collapse of the great real estate bubble of the 2000s. So far, the warnings of a collapse have not panned out. But, it is increasingly clear that it is a question of when not whether...
After announcing General Electric's company-wide push into so-called green technologies in May, Jeffrey Immelt, the company's CEO, stressed that the move is not part of some save-the-planet idealism. Rather, he said, GE's initiative is driven by...
When Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter got married back in 1997, the idea was to create a Wall Street powerhouse: a white shoe investment bank (Morgan Stanley) with a nationwide, albeit work-a-day, distribution network (Dean Witter). That, at least...
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...
In 1984, Julian Mayo was a trainee at Schroders, an investment bank, when he was sent to investigate a little-known automaker in a town called Ulsan on the southeast coast of Korea. The Asian nation was still under dictatorship, which meant army...
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...
Who do wealth owners trust most for financial advice? Outside their family officers, it's their lawyers and accountants. Clearly these advisors are not experts in the stock market. But what they can bring to the table is independence, strategic...