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...
For years, reps have been told that separately managed accounts (SMAs), were being The institutional-quality management, tax efficiency, transparency and customization that had made SMAs so popular among high-net-worth individuals would be...
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...
A recent New York magazine article declared 2005 a golden age for video games, and anyone who has played Resident Evil 4, Madden NFL 2005 or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas can agree. What remains to be seen is whether this golden age extends to the...
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...