Investors' perceptions skewed
From The Wall Street Journal
A new study by Boston's Financial Research Corp. shows that larger fund firms which advertise heavily are perceived to have stronger long- and short- term performance than is actually the case, in many instances. An example is the ranking of Fidelity and Vanguard by those surveyed, ranking them second and third in performance. FRC judged the two to be much lower, ranked 37th and 35th respectively in overall performance.

Will MFS follow in SunLife's footsteps?
From The Boston Globe
MFS Investment Management parent SunLife Financial went public last week, with hardly a ripple in the hot IPO market, pricing at $8.50 and closing yesterday at $9.1875, giving it a market cap of about $3.7 billion. The Canadian company, which owns a majority stake in MFS, has pledged to give another two percent of the firm to its managers over the next year, making it 22% self-owned. Questions have now arisen as to the possibility of the MFS unit, which currently manages about $122 billion in assets, being spun out as a separate company.

Liquidation trend growing
From The Boston Globe
Munder Value, N/I Numeric Larger Cap Value, and three Van Kampen funds have all announced liquidation plans in March. Skyline has merged two other funds into its Special Equities fund, and AIM announced it will fold the remaining funds it bought from GT Global into existing AIM funds. The liquidation option, although fairly rare still, is gaining popularity, as there is little downside to simply closing a fund which generates little revenue and appears to have no momentum.

 

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