Hartford [profile] Financial Services Group reported core earnings of $324 million or $0.66 per diluted share for the second quarter, missing analyst expectations of $0.71 per share. Its revenue beat the average revenue estimate of $5.46 billion, at $5.47 billion, according to Wall Street Cheat Sheet. Hartford posted a net loss of $190 million or $0.42 per diluted share, in contrast to $101 million or $0.26 per diluted share in last year's second quarter. Its mutual fund business brought in $20 million, up from $19 million in the second quarter of last year.

Reading through Seeking Alpha's transcript of Hartford's earnings call, MFWire found two things of note for fundsters:

POINT 1: Davey's sales efforts appear to be working. Liam McGee, chairman, CEO and president of Hartford, talked up Davey's work:

In mutual funds, Jim Davey and his team continued to make progress with strong growth sales and solid investment performance against benchmarks in the second quarter. We remain optimistic about our ability to improve net flows and grow assets under management ...

... Mutual funds core earnings were up 5% relative to the second quarter of 2012. Jim Davey and his team continue to build momentum in key areas, including sales, distribution initiatives and fund performance.

Sales were up 32% over the prior year. Net flows were negative, including $2.5 billion in 2 large redemptions, one of which was a $1.4 billion institutional account that was expected to redeem.

POINT 2: Alternative flows have stablilized.

Jay Adam Cohen of Bank of America Merrill Lynch: I'm with BofA Merrill Lynch. A couple of questions. For the third quarter guidance, Chris, you had mentioned a somewhat lower run rate for the performance of some of the alternative investment funds. Is that because these are reported on a lag, you have a sense of the performance already?

Christopher John Swift, chief financial officer, executive vice president and ember of enterprise risk and capital committee: Yes, I would say a combination of that, and then just the early read into July's performance. So I would say July was pretty volatile and some of our alternative allocations actually went negative for July. So as we look really at the remaining 2 months, August and September, Jay, we just are heavily influenced by what we're seeing through June and July.

See the Seeking Alpha transcript of Hartford's earnings call and the earnings release for more on how Hartford is doing.  

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