CNA won't sell units
From Chicago Tribune
CNA Financial Corp. has decided to not sell its life insurance operations after all. The insurer put the units, which include its retirement operations, up for bid March. However, the bids it received failed to meet its expected price. The insurer will continue to pursue the sales of its viatical settlements business and its life reinsurance business. "At the end of the day, we didn't get the price we wanted," Donald Lofe, CNA group vice president of corporate finance is quoted as saying. He added that the company was planning to operate CNA Life on a stand-alone basis but that it will not be spun-off in an IPO.

DLJ & Bessemer buy Brundage units
From New York Times
Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette is buying Brundage, Story and & Rose's institutional fixed-income division with $3.3 billion in assets under management. Meanwhile, Bessemer Trust, a specialist in managing money for the high-net-worth market, is reported to be buying the private-client and institutional-equity groups of Brundage. Both firms are privately held. The second deal will boost Bessemer's asset base by $4.5 billion to $33 billion and add 800 clients. In both transactions terms were not revealed. Francis S. Branin, the chief executive of Brundage told the paper that size was an issue in the deal. "We felt that longer term, it was probably going to be more and more difficult for medium-size firms like ours to compete across a broad range of services," he said. Brundage was founded as the family office for a partner of Andrew Carnegie.

Do insurers and funds mix?
From Boston Globe
State Street Research & Management has lost its top marketing executive and its chief executive to Internet start-ups in the past four months. So far the positions remain unfilled (the paper reports that the top candidate for the CEO spot is a T. Rowe Price executive). As its parent company, MetLife Inc., searches to fill the positions, the paper writes that the struggles at Met reflect the struggles of the insurance industry in general to build a reputation as money managers. "Insurers have a poor record of inspiring top-notch fund performance and attracting assets to their fund groups," claims the paper. It also points to John Hancock Financial Services Inc., where "fund assets are dwindling at a time when more successful fund groups are exploding."

More on Co. Stock in 401ks
From USA Today
Yet another articles, this time in USA Today, uses Hewitt's recent research to warns readers not to place too much of their 401(k) account in their employers stock. Hewitt found that 41 percent of plan assets were invested in company stock. The article points to Procter & Gamble stock's 31 percent drop on March 7 as an example of what can go wrong.

Manager departures should not be an automatic sale sign
From Wall Street Journal
The departure of a fund manager is not automatic cause for investors to dump their shares, claims the article. Morningstar found that in the year after managers left funds gained an average of 19.06% compared with 14.92% in the year before the departure. It recommends that investors should "wait to see how the new manager does before selling a fund." It also recommends evaluating "whether the departing manager was making the fund's investment decisions alone or was part of a management team" and "how much the fund relies on quantitative methods to pick investments." 

Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE