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Please excuse the vanity, but hopefully this will be of value to someone. http://www.congressionalfund.com/ is the website for a fund started up last year that I think might be of natural interest to Freepers. I just learned about it and have to admit I'm intrigued. The premise behind the find is that old saw about how no one is safe while Congress is in session. The fund managers are taking that literally, claiming that research shows the stock market performs MUCH better while Congress is out of session than in session. Therefore, they pull out and sit on cash while...

Mutual-fund firms rocked by asset decline Stock and bond funds take major hit; record outflows in October By Sam Mamudi, MarketWatch Last update: 2:28 p.m. EST Nov. 25, 2008NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- After seeming to weather the worst of the credit storm, the mutual-fund industry has been getting walloped, losing more than 20% of assets under management in just five months. Data from research firm Lipper show that as of Oct. 31, mutual funds of all types -- stock funds, bond funds and money market funds -- had $9.5 trillion in assets. That's a 20.8% drop from where the industry...

Redemptions tipped to hit $1 trillion this year Mike Foster 24 Nov 2008 Redemptions from hedge funds and mutual funds are expected to total $1 trillion (€800bn) by the end of the year, according to US advisory boutique Empirical Research Partners. Empirical estimates that between $650bn and $700bn will be withdrawn from hedge funds and a further $325bn to $350bn from mutual funds, making it the worst result in 20 years. It said: “The combined outflows amount to 6.5% to 7% of the capitalization of the US equity market. While we’re not believers in supply/ demand analysis, that’s a sizeable...

The Reserve Primary Fund, the giant money market fund whose customers have been waiting more than six weeks for their cash, announced late Thursday night that it would begin mailing checks to shareholders on Friday — for half their original investment. The announcement was the first indication of the losses the fund sustained when a wave of redemptions on Sept. 15 forced it to freeze withdrawals and liquidate its assets. The next day, the fund said it had “broken the buck,” reporting a per-share value of less than a dollar. The announced per-share payment — 50 cents on the dollar...

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The intellectual force behind President Bush's plan to overhaul Social Security, the man the president calls his favorite "Democrat economist," is not an economist. He is Robert C. Pozen, a lawyer and mutual fund executive who serves as chairman of MFS Investment Management in Boston. A registered Democrat, Mr. Pozen donated money to the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry last year and voted for him on Nov. 2. He was a classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton at Yale Law School. But all that has not stopped President Bush from embracing Mr. Pozen's main idea to bring the nation's public...

SEATTLE - A mutual fund company that invests only in businesses it deems socially responsible has dropped Starbucks Corp., citing the coffee giant's launch of a java liqueur with whiskey maker Jim Beam. Pax World Funds, a Portsmouth, N.H.-based fund family, steers clear of companies involved in defense or weapons, tobacco, liquor or gambling. It sold 375,000 shares of Starbucks worth an estimated $23.4 million, about 1.6 percent of its Pax World Balanced Fund portfolio, the fund said in a statement released Wednesday. "While we continue to admire and respect many aspects of Starbucks' business and corporate citizenship activities, the...

Sensing public outrage over business corruption in America is waning, some in the corporate community are seizing on the shift in mood to try to roll back reforms, say top U.S. officials and academics. "There's clearly a rearguard action going on," said Maryland Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes in an interview three years after the Enron debacle that led to his co-authoring of landmark corporate governance and accounting reforms in 2002. Business scandals are now daily fare for Americans, from the prison sentencing on Friday of a former top Boeing Co. executive to revelations of abusive trading in the mutual fund...

<p>Eliot Spitzer held the spotlight for a second day of hearings on mutual fund scandals with news that he's now going after the world's biggest bank - Deutsche Bank.</p> <p>The crusading New York attorney general is targeting the giant bank's American arm in his widening probe of improper trading in the $7 trillion mutual funds industry, Reuters quoted sources as saying.</p>

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street is waiting for the next shoe to drop. The next smackdown may come from the big hole the stock market's crash has punched in corporate pension funds. Corporate underfunding, as it's called, is a ticking time bomb that will cast more doubt on the profitability of the nation's largest companies and the market's rebound. ``In the years ahead, earnings are likely to be depleted by pension liabilities,'' says John Hussman, publisher of Hussman Econometrics and professor of economics at the University of Michigan. ``Many companies continue to make assumptions about the probable return on...

Stocks skidded lower today with the Nasdaq losing the most ground. The Nasdaq dropped 3%, the S&P 500 fell 2.3%, and the Dow lost 2% to close down 180 points to 8872. The Russell 2000 followed suit, dropping 2.3%. For the week the Dow added 1.1%, the S&P 500 1.3% and the Nasdaq 1.4%. Internet stocks were big losers today with the Bloomberg Internet index down 3.7%. For the week the Internet stocks gained 7.4%. Utilities fell 1.5% despite a rally in Treasuries. The 10-year closed out the week at 4.23% compared to 4.32% a week ago. Spot gold prices...