Coming Soon: The First 'Net Index Fund
From Smart Money
Britain-based Investec Guinness Flight, best known for its Wired Index Fund, is currently negotiating Internet.com, to license the ISDEX for a new fund. The fund would be the first Internet index fund. Also negotiating for the rights to use the ISDEX for a fund is San Diego-based Capstone Investments.

Liberty Settles with FTC
From The Boston Herald
Liberty Financial, manager of the Stein Roe Young Investor fund, settled with the Federal Trade Commission in a dispute over the collection of personal information from minors on its Web site. Liberty promised young Web surfers prizes and email newsletters if they completed a questionaire asking for personal information. The fund company then compiled this information into a marketing database. "This was quite an extreme example of the invasion of families' confidential financial information," FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky told the Herald. Under the terms of the settlement Liberty will send the prizes (worth $150) and comply with rules regarding the use of personal information of minors for marketing.

Johnson's Son Unmasked as Yahoo! Booster of Franklin
From The Wall Street Journal
What do you do if you are the son of a CEO who is being attacked on Yahoo's stock message board? If you are William Johnson, you step up and defend dad's virtue. William, son of Franklin CEO Charles Johnson has been identified as a defender of Franklin's management and prospects on the Yahoo message board for Franklin. The younger Johnson, a filmaker not employed in the family business, informed readers of the message board that April's cash flows would be positive and that the stock would hit $45. However, he denies knowledge of inside information. Read the post unmasking Bill Johnson and the youngest Johnson's acknowledgement of his identity.

Lipper Redefines Equity-Income
From The Wall Street Journal
As Lipper redefines its fund categories, the debate over what is an equity-income is reheating. Lipper will keep the objective, but require that funds it defines as "equity-income" have a dividend payout of 125% or more of that of the average fund. Under this definition about 10% of self-proclaimed equity-income funds will lose that designation. The net effect may be to make funds such as Janus Equity Income hew closer to their objective rather than chase hot stocks such as Cisco, Microsoft and others with no dividend.

There are Still More Stocks Than Stock Funds
From Fortune
Mutual Funds: 1,840; Stocks: 7,174. That's the scorecard in the funds versus stocks game as counted by Fortune. The magazine argues that the 12,000 plus fund number widely bantied about is misleading since it counts multiple share classes as different funds. It also counts non-stock funds and international funds.

Funds in the Press

• Syre and Stein use the Pioneer Emerging Market fund as an example of the turnaround emerging markets in their Boston Globe column.
• Wordly Investor profiles Dresdner RCM Global Technology Fund.

 

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