Manager takes ownership
From The Wall Street Journal
Hot portfolio managers are getting harder to keep. In turn ownership arrangements involving portfolio managers are becoming more common in the mutual fund industry. Bill Miller whose Legg Mason Value Trust fund is on the road to beat the S & P 500 for the ninth year in a row, will manage the new Legg Mason Opportunity Trust. He will also have a 50% stake in the new firm, LMM LLC. Legg Mason will own the remaining 50% stake.

A pain in the audit
From The Wall Street Journal
Fidelity Investments is looking to get rid of PricewaterhouseCoopers as the auditor of four of its top mutual funds because two of the firm's consulting executives owned shares in one of the funds. This is the latest fallout from the SEC's campaign against conflicts of interest in the accounting industry, and more such instances could take place as the result of changes to securities laws now in the works. Fidelity is now asking its shareholders in Fidelity Asset Manager Growth and three related funds -- Fidelity Asset Manager, Fidelity Asset Manager Income and Spartan Investment Grade Bond Fund -- to ratify its proposal to replace PwC with Deloitte & Touche LLP as the funds' new auditor.

Hard to find info
From The New York Post
The mutual fund industry disseminates much information over the Internet but when it comes to new mutual funds the information is harder to fund (with the obvious exception of the MFWire.com, of course). The First Omaha Growth fund in the past five years has had average annual returns of 16.47% per year, but those statistics are not available at the Morningstar site since they date back to before the portfolio officially became a mutual fund.  

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