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Reuters – Fidelity Investments’ Harry Lange, manager of its one-time star Magellan fund, made what now looks like a poorly timed move in June: he nearly doubled his holdings of AIG.
Lange, who has already seen other financial bets sour, driving the $35.2 billion (19.6 billion pound) fund down 17.3 percent since July, may be just one of several fund managers to get burned by American International Group Inc’s meltdown.
Though it’s unclear where Magellan’s holding stood when the government launched its $85 billion government bailout of the giant insurer on Tuesday, Lange in June boosted the fund’s holdings of AIG to $865.1 million from $475 million in May.
And that was just a piece of the substantial 5.81 percent stake, or 156 million shares, held by Fidelity, the world’s biggest mutual fund company, as of the end of June, according to Reuters data.
Bloomberg – Days after a March negotiating session to buy San Francisco’s Citicorp Center building for $370 million, Park Hyeon Joo is in the air on a Korean Air flight bound for Seoul, sipping a glass of red wine. He’s not celebrating.
Park, founder and chairman of Seoul-based Mirae Asset Financial Group, the biggest mutual fund company in South Korea, has just given up on his plan to open a branch of Mirae in Los Angeles despite its large Korean-American community.
He’s seen firsthand the swoon in U.S. markets triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis. Recalling the flight, he says he took out his laptop and spent the next three hours writing a somber memo to his 16,900 employees.
Reuters- John Templeton, a pioneering mutual fund manager, global investor and billionaire philanthropist, died of pneumonia in a hospital in the Bahamas on Tuesday, a spokeswoman at his foundation said. He was 95.
Templeton, who started his career on Wall Street in 1937, created several successful international funds before selling Templeton Funds in 1992 to Franklin Resources for $440 million (223 million pounds) in what was then the largest acquisition of an independent mutual fund company.
He remained deeply involved in his business until he was nearly 80, when he shifted focus to philanthropy. "People keep noticing that I’m 79 years old, and ask me what would happen if I would die," he told Reuters in an interview in 1992 while negotiating the sale of his firm.
