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Displaying 121-130 out of 441 results for "Mutual Fund".

Behringer Harvard / TIER REIT Illustrates How Non-Traded REIT Sponsors and Brokers Have Siphoned $10 Billion to $20 Billion (and Counting) From Investors

(Jan 2014)

Sponsors have issued, and brokers had sold, over $85 billion of non-traded real estate investment trusts (REITs) by the end of 2012. These investments are illiquid, high-commissioned, poorly diversified real estate investments. Despite their glaring defects another $20 billion of non-traded REITs were sold to investors in 2013.

Sponsors and brokers have siphoned off at least $20 billion from investors through their sales of non-traded REITs up through 2012. We illustrate the calculation of...

Did UBS Charge its Proprietary Puerto Rico Bond Funds Excessive Markups? Part II

(Jan 2014)

We have previously posted several blog posts about UBS Puerto Rico's collapsing closed-end municipal bond funds including: Trouble in Paradise: UBS Puerto Rico Bond Fund Investors Hit Hard, Diversification and UBS Puerto Rico Bond Fund Losses, Did UBS Charge its Proprietary Puerto Rico Bond Funds Excessive Markups? and Merry Christmas from UBS Asset Managers of Puerto Rico.

UBS has argued that since we couldn't identify which trades in the EMMA data were the UBS bond fund trades and UBS...

FINRA Regulatory Priorities 2014

(Jan 2014)

Early this month, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) released their 2014 regulatory and examination proirities . FINRA is continuing to focus on the suitability of recommendations made to retail investors. FINRA specifically mentions complex structured products (including leveraged ETFs), non-traded REITs, frontier funds, and interest rate sensitive instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and municipal bonds. At a recent conference, a FINRA representative added that...

Diversification and UBS Puerto Rico Bond Fund Losses

(Dec 2013)

The 19 closed-end bond funds managed by UBS Puerto Rico listed in Table 1 lost $1.66 billion in the first 9 months of 2013. These funds were sold almost exclusively to citizens of Puerto Rico and approximately 70% of the portfolios of these funds were invested in Puerto Rican securities. The percentage losses over the past year range from 38% to 48% for the worst-performing UBS PR funds. These losses are substantially greater than Puerto Rican municipal bonds generally. The Standard and...

Diversificación y Pérdidas de los Fondos de Bonos de UBS Puerto Rico

(Dec 2013)

Los 19 fondos cerrados de bonos administrados por UBS Puerto Rico presentados en la Tabla 1 registraron pérdidas de $1.66 billones de dólares durante los primeros 9 meses del año 2013. Estos fondos fueron vendidos casi exclusivamente a ciudadanos de Puerto Rico y aproximadamente el 70% de las carteras de estos fondos se invirtieron en títulos Puertorriqueños. En el último año, las pérdidas de los fondos de UBS PR con peor desempeño fluctuaron entre un 38% y 48%. En general, estas pérdidas...

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - December 27th, 2013

(Dec 2013)

SEC Charges Archer-Daniels-Midland Company with FCPA Violations
December 24, 2013, (Litigation Release No. 22900)
According to the complaint, Archer-Daniels-Midland Company failed to "prevent illicit payments made by foreign subsidiaries to Ukrainian government officials." The SEC found that "ADM's subsidiaries in Germany and Ukraine paid $21 million in bribes" and ADM made "approximately $33 million in illegal profits as a result of the bribery by its subsidiaries." ADM has agreed to be...

Feliz Navidad de parte de UBS Asset Managers de Puerto Rico

(Dec 2013)

Anteriormente SLCG había publicado dos entradas sobre el colapso de los fondos UBS de bonos municipales de Puerto Rico incluyendo los fondos Puerto Rico Fixed Income Funds I y VI y Puerto Rico Investors Tax-Free Funds I y VI. Nuestra entrada del 7 de Octubre de 2013 titulada Peligro en la Isla del Encanto: Inversionistas de UBS Puerto Rico Sufren Cuantiosas Pérdidas, reportamos sobre las pérdidas en los fondos cerrados de bonos municipales administrados por UBS Asset Managers de Puerto Rico...

Merry Christmas from UBS Asset Managers of Puerto Rico

(Dec 2013)

SLCG previously posted two blog entries on the collapse of UBS's Puerto Rico municipal bond funds including the Puerto Rico Fixed Income Funds I to VI and Puerto Rico Investors Tax-Free Funds I to VI. Our October 7, 2013 post, Trouble in Paradise: UBS Puerto Rico Bond Fund Investors Hit Hard, reported on losses in closed end municipal bond funds managed by UBS Asset Managers of Puerto Rico and sold by UBS brokers in Puerto Rico. Then on December 18, 2013 in our Did UBS Charge its Proprietary...

Are Managed Futures a License to Steal?

(Dec 2013)

Bloomberg's David Evans raised this question in his recent Fleeced by Fees. David found that 89% of the futures trading profits and interest on collateral in 63 SEC-registered managed futures funds from 2003 to 2012 were consumed by fees and commissions. David's story shines a light on the abusive fees charged by the managed futures partnerships. His story quotes a spokesperson for the National Futures Association self-regulatory organization / trade group as saying that "We can't just give...

Self-Indexing in Commodity-Linked Investments - Citi CUBES

(Dec 2013)

Over the past few weeks and months, we've noticed a pattern in the products coming across our desks: structured investments linked to esoteric proprietary indexes, created by the same bank that issued the product. We touched on this topic a bit when we discussed self-indexing in the context of structured certificates of deposit, but we thought we'd revisit the issue with a few of the examples that we've been looking into more recently. The examples we'll discuss each reference a proprietary...

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