News digest for July 21, 2006

Hedge funds rake in big bucks
Hedge funds attracted $42 billion of new money in the second quarter, the largest quarterly spike in new assets since 2003, according to an industry tracker.

Equities on the edge
Fund managers are turning away from equities in the biggest potential downturn since the aftermath of 9/11, according to a new research report by Merrill Lynch. The survey finds that a net 31 percent of the investors surveyed are overweight cash – the highest level since the panic in the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

China’s IPO Train
Deals are getting done here, there, and everywhere in China as companies and banks rush forward with initial public offerings.

US investors seek returns overseas
“Many corporate and public plan sponsors are facing severe underfunding crises, and they are looking for ways to close the gap between assets and liabilities without making huge cash contributions,” said John Colon, Greenwich consultant. “Since international equities have been outperforming domestic stocks, many US institutions are opting to shift these assets into foreign equities.”

Full-Service Brokers Losing Hold on Affluent
Full-service brokers made something of a comeback in the past year, but it remains to be seen whether they truly have ended the erosion of their market share as primary advisers to the affluent.

Heinz Unleashes Tangy Secret Weapon
Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh-based food giant handed out custom-designed bottles of its namesake ketchup to about 1,000 of its employees as part of an effort to win their votes in the upcoming director elections.

For the Weekend:

Will Majority Rule Prevail in Electing Corporate Boards?
Majority voting is not untested, though. It is currently the standard in Europe, and a handful of large U.S. companies, including Best Buy Co. Inc.; U.S. Bancorp; and Lockheed Martin Corporation have employed majority voting for years, even weathering no-vote campaigns against directors.

Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare: The Progress and the Promise of Microformats
Microformats are simple extensions to the standard HTML tags used to create web pages. By including the additional microformat markup, web pages go from merely presenting the visual display of content to embodying its meaning.

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