(July 13, 2006) Acuity Funds retained its No. 1 spot on Morningstar’s Five-Star Mutual Funds list for the month ending June 30. The company has 11 five-star funds, followed by Dynamic Funds and CI Investments with eight and six, respectively. Mackenzie Financial, Altamira Investment Services and RBC Asset Management took fourth place after one Mackenzie fund and two RBC funds dropped out of the five-star category.
Combining mutual funds, segregated funds, and including multiple versions of the same funds, CI has the highest number of five-star funds, reflecting the number of the company’s individual fund offerings, followed by Manulife and Acuity.
Among the top 20 companies by total retail fund assets under management, which also includes multiple versions of the same fund, Barclays Global Investors Canada has the highest percentage of five-star rated funds (30%), followed by Dynamic Funds with 22%. Three of the 10 funds rated by Barclays have a five-star rating, while 10 of the 45 Dynamic funds have the highest rating.
A total of 273 funds in Morningstar Canada’s database have a five-star rating, compared to 240 with a one-star rating. The Morningstar Rating is a quantitative measure of a fund’s historical risk-adjusted performance compared to other funds in its category. Only funds with a history of at least three years are taken into account. About one-third of all funds in Morningstar’s retail fund database posted positive returns in June.
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Liquidnet gets green light to trade Canadian stocks
(July 13, 2006) Liquidnet Canada announced that it has received approval from the Ontario Securities Commission to begin trading in Canadian equities by institutional member firms beginning in the fourth quarter of 2006.
“We have worked diligently to achieve this goal since we opened our operations in Canada in 2004,” said Liquidnet Canada Managing Director Robert Young. “Canada is the seventh-largest equity market in the world, and 30% of our nearly 350 global members manage Canadian equity assets.”
Liquidnet members currently trade in the US and 14 European markets. “Equity markets have recently experienced an unprecedented move towards globalization, and Liquidnet’s goal is to provide our members with the largest natural pool of global liquidity in the industry, while making trading cheaper and easier for them,” said the company’s CEO Seth Merrin.
“For example, through Liquidnet, a buying company from France will be able to trade one million shares of Italian companies with a Canadian member. This is a global institutional market.”
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MX establishes a new climate exchange market
(July 13, 2006) Montreal Exchange and Chicago Climate Exchange have partnered to create the Montreal Climate Exchange, touted as Canada’s first green marketplace.
The mission of the new exchange is to bring price transparency, environmental integrity, low costs, broad access and reliability to the many sectors of the Canadian economy involved in air quality and climate change by leveraging MX’s experience in trading systems, settlements, market regulation and financial risk management in the emissions trading space and other environmental financial products.
Luc Bertrand, president and CEO of MX, says the new exchange will benefit from emerging plans in Canada to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, expected in the fall. “We believe our approach provides the broad flexibility and quality required to implement a variety of ideas and regulatory frameworks. Our partner, CCX, has already developed systems that work in different regulatory environments in the US and Europe,” he says.
The Chicago Climate Exchange is the only one in North America and the first in the world to have a legally binding, multi-sector, rules-based and integrated system for recording, reducing and trading greenhouse gas emissions. Members include non-industrial environmental innovators as well as North American public and private sector entities such as Abitibi-Consolidated, Manitoba Hydro, Ford Motor, International Paper, IBM, DuPont, American Electric Power and cities such as Chicago, Oakland in California; Boulder, Colorado, Portland, Oregon and New Mexico.
“The Montreal Climate Exchange will accelerate the development of an organized environmental market in Canada,” says Bertrand. “Since our initial announcement last December, we have received many requests for information. There is no doubt that people are interested. Canada’s industrial and financial communities are ready to embrace market-based solutions.”
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Le Pan of OFSI to resign
(July 13, 2006) Nicholas Le Pan, head of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, leaves his position. An OSFI spokesman confirmed that Le Pan submitted his resignation to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on July 11.
Le Pan will leave his post on October 13. He was appointed to this position in September 2001 for a seven-year term. He joined OFSI in 1995 as Assistant Superintendent for Policy in 1995 and in 2000 was appointed Assistant Superintendent for Governance.
Prior to joining OSFI, Le Pan was a special advisor to the deputy minister in the federal department of finance, leading the task force that finalized the government’s white paper on the supervisory, deposit insurance and policyholder protection regime.
In June, Le Pan spoke to Benefits Canada on the state of the retirement environment. “We have seen a trend/move away from defined benefit plans,” he said. He also said that OSFI “encourages people to face reality… and if you don’t face reality (plan members and sponsors), you won’t have a meaningful chance of positively resolving this (pension issue).” (Compiled by Joel Kranc, Benefits Canada)
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