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(July 13, 2006) Acuity Funds has retained top spot on the list of Morningstar’s five-star mutual funds 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 tied for the fourth place position after one Mackenzie fund and two RBC funds slipped out of the five-star category.

When combining mutual funds, segregated funds and including multiple versions of the same funds, CI has the highest number of five-star funds, reflecting the company’s number of individual fund offerings, followed by Manulife and Acuity.

Among the 20 largest companies by total retail fund assets under management, again including multiple versions of the same fund, Barclays Global Investors Canada has the highest percentage of funds rated five stars, with 30%, followed by Dynamic Funds with 22%. Three of Barclays’ 10 rated funds have five stars, while 10 of Dynamic’s 45 funds carry the top rating.

In total, 273 funds in the Morningstar Canada database are five-star rated, compared to 240 with a one-star rating. The Morningstar rating is a quantitative measure of a fund’s historical risk-adjusted performance relative to other funds in its category. Only funds with at least a three-year track record are considered. About one-third of all funds in Morningstar’s retail fund database had positive returns in June.

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Liquidnet gets green light to trade Canadian equities

(July 13, 2006) Liquidnet Canada has announced that it has received approval from the Ontario Securities Commission for its institutional member firms to begin trading Canadian equities, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2006.

“We’ve been working diligently towards this goal since we opened our Canadian operations in 2004,” said Liquidnet Canada managing director Robert Young. “Canada is the seventh-largest equities market in the world, and 30% of our nearly 350 global members have Canadian equity assets under management.”

Liquidnet members currently trade in the U.S. as well as in 14 European markets. “The equity markets have seen unparalleled moves toward globalization recently, and Liquidnet’s goal is to provide our members with the largest natural pool of global liquidity in the industry, while making it cheaper and easier for them to trade,” said company CEO Seth Merrin.

“Through Liquidnet, a buy-side firm in France, for example, will be able to trade a million shares of an Italian stock with a member in Canada. That is a global institutional marketplace.”

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MX establishes new Climate Exchange market

(July 13, 2006) The Montreal Exchange and the Chicago Climate Exchange have partnered to create the Montreal Climate Exchange, touted as the first market for environmental products in Canada.

The new exchange has a mission to offer price transparency, environmental integrity, low cost, wide access and reliability to the many sectors of the Canadian economy involved in air quality and climate change issues by applying MX’s experience in trading systems, clearing, market regulation and financial risk management to the area of emissions trading and other environmental financial products.

Luc Bertrand, president and CEO of MX, says the new exchange will benefit from emerging plans in Canada to deal with greenhouse gas emissions reduction, expected in the fall. “We are confident that our approach offers the wide flexibility and quality required to advance a variety of ideas and regulatory frameworks. Our partner, CCX, has already developed systems that operate in the disparate regulatory environments of the U.S. and Europe,” he says.

The Chicago Climate Exchange is North America’s only, and the world’s first, legally binding multi-sectoral, rule-based and integrated greenhouse gas emission registry, reduction and trading system. Members include non-industrial environmental innovators as well as public and private sector North American entities like Abitibi-Consolidated, Manitoba Hydro, Ford Motor, International Paper, IBM, DuPont, American Electric Power, and cities such as Chicago, Oakland, California; Boulder, Colorado, Portland, Oregon and the State of New Mexico.

“The Montreal Climate Exchange will accelerate the development of a structured environmental market in Canada,” says Bertrand. “Since our first announcement last December, we have received a multitude of requests for information. There is no doubt that people are interested. The Canadian industrial and financial communities are ready to welcome market-based solutions.”

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OFSI’s Le Pan to resign

(July 13, 2006) Nicholas Le Pan, the head of the Office of Superintendent of Financial Institutions is stepping down. A spokesperson with OSFI confirmed that Le Pan gave his letter of resignation to Jim Flaherty, the Minister of Finance, on July 11.

Le Pan will leave his post on October 13. He was appointed to the position in September 2001 for a seven-year tern. He joined OFSI in 1995 as deputy superintendent (policy) in 1995 and was named deputy superintendent (supervision) in 2000.

Before joining OSFI, Le Pan served as special advisor to the deputy minister in the federal department of finance, leading a task force that finalized a government white paper on the supervisory, deposit insurance and policyholder protection regime.

In June Le Pan spoke with Benefits Canada on the state of the pension environment. “We’ve got a trend/movement away from defined benefit plans,” he said. He also said that OSFI is “encouraging people to face reality…and if you don’t face reality [plan members and sponsors] have not got a significant chance of solving this [pension problem] in a positive way.” (Filed by Joel Kranc, Benefits Canada)

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