Fund Times: Awful Fund Headed for Well-Deserved Exit

We're not the only ones who notice that the funds we pan are lousy. Fund companies notice, too, and our Fund Analyst Pans have a pretty high mortality rate.

Phoenix funds added another fund to the list of extinct pans this week when it announced plans to merge the awful  Phoenix Nifty Fifty  into  Phoenix Capital Growth . This extremely un-nifty fund has an annualized return of just 1% over the trailing 10 years. That's worse than 96% of large-growth funds. In short, the ticker says it all.

Nearly all of the bad results happened under Engemann Capital Management, but Phoenix recently fired Engemann and moved this fund and Capital Growth to Harris Investment Management, which runs the Harris Insight funds.

The merger is set to take place around Dec. 1, 2006.

TIAA-CREF Reports Error that Cost Fundholders
TIAA-CREF disclosed that it had shortchanged roughly 30,000 investors in the retirement share class of TIAA-CREF Institutional International Equity (TRERX). In a filing with the SEC, the firm said it wrongly allocated income and capital gains between share classes of the fund on May 26, 2006, leaving retirement share class holders with lower returns than they would have had otherwise. TIAA-CREF says it will compensate investors who lost more than $10 by this November. The firm has not provided a total dollar amount for the error.

Dreyfus and Putnam Among Firms Settling Performance Fee Case with SEC
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that four firms had settled with the agency and agreed to provide restitution to shareholders for errors made in calculating performance fees. Because they used the wrong method for calculating assets, the five firms overcharged fundholders. The firms are Dreyfus, Numeric Investors, Gartmore, Putnam, and Kensington. The five payouts totaled $7.4 million.

The firms improperly used average asset figures to calculate the amount of the fees. Dreyfus was tagged with the largest payout: $3.2 million. Gartmore was at the other end with a payout of $654,000.

Click here for the SEC press release. Click here for the Dow Jones news story.

China Funds Are Rocking
The list of international funds ranked by year-to-date returns is dominated by China funds. Eight of the top 10 slots belong to China funds, in fact. Heading the list are  Oberweis China Opportunities (OBCHX) with a 40.7% return through Sept. 11, 2006. Next is Old Mutual Clay Finlay China  with a 40.6% return.

The only non-China funds on the top-10 list are ING Russia  up 33.3% and Metzler/Payden European Emerging Markets  up 23.6%.