Van Kampen Fined
From The Wall Street Journal
As reported yesterday by the MFWire.com, the Van Kampen Growth Fund was fined for failure to disclose exactly how it achieved its stellar 61.99% gain in 1996. The fund's early performance while still an "incubator" was bloated from hot IPO stocks -- the SEC fined Van Kampen Investments and its former CIO for not disclosing that to investors. Without proper background information on how past returns are generated, investors' expectations about future returns could have been falsely inflated, according to the SEC. The SEC fined Van Kampen $100,000 for failure to disclose adequate performance information, and fined its former CIO $25,000.

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Schwab woos advisors
From The Wall Street Journal
Charles Schwab Corp. is boosting its services for independent financial advisors and reducing some commissions amid competitive pressures from the financial services industry. Schwab said it will launch a new Web site for its 5,600 advisers, allowing them to make transactions, including bulk purchases for many clients at a time, more quickly and easily. For customers with at least $100,000 in their account Schwab is setting up special teams of phone representatives to answer customers' account-related questions.

Extended hours won't faze fund managers ... for now
From The Chicago Tribune
Fund managers may be the big losers if exchanges extend trading hours. Liquidity might pose a major problem for managers trying to trade on off-hours. Today most of the after-hours trading done through special programs is done by individual investors. One manager said that institutions don't want to be buying or selling the 100-share lots that individual investors are moving. The sentiment is that until the market heats up and there are a lot more traders, fund companies will ignore the extended hours.

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