Investors

There's no sugarcoating what happened to stock mutual funds last year. Wall Street's deepest losses since the 1930s ravaged the fund nest eggs of millions of Americans. There was almost no place to hide. The average domestic stock fund lost 36% in 2008, according to Morningstar Inc. It was worse for foreign stock funds, which for five straight years through 2007 had posted much bigger gains than domestic funds -- in turn luring an avalanche of money from U.S. investors.

Mutual fund investors should always take note of what investing fees they're being charged, particularly in this tough investing climate. Transactions: The costs associated with an individual investor's transactions and account are listed in a fee table, located near the front of a fund's prospectus, under the heading "Shareholder Fees." They include: * Sales loads: A fee charged to compensate the brokers.

The travails of the financial markets could hurt mutual fund investors in more ways than one. In addition to slashing the value of your portfolio, the bear market also has taken a pound of flesh from the companies that manage your mutual funds. That normally wouldn't be a cause for you to be concerned, but it could become one if the industry's troubles linger.

Alternative investing these days seems to mean finding an alternative to once red-hot hedge funds. Institutional investors and well-heeled investors yanked a record $152 billion of their cash from hedge funds in the fourth quarter, and $155 billion for all of 2008, marking only the second year with net withdrawals since Hedge Fund Research began tracking the industry in 1990. Total industry assets shrank to $1.4 trillion by year-end, from the mid-2008 peak of $1.

One month into the new year and the stock market already finds itself in a deep hole. For people whose portfolios were devastated by last year's market crash -- but who still held fast to their stock investments -- this may force some soul-searching about how much more pain they can handle. Right off the bat, let's point up the good news here: Corporate, municipal and mortgage bonds generally have been profitable investments this month.

To rid banks of their toxic loans, the Obama administration apparently wants to rely on purchases of those assets by private investors -- but with the government's help. Whether investors will step up depends on how favorable Uncle Sam makes the terms. And the better for them, conceivably, the worse for taxpayers. Today, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is set to announce the administration's plan for Phase 2 of the $700-billion financial system bailout enacted in the fall.

Investors have pulled out of a multi-film financing agreement with Lionsgate, the movie and television studio behind the "Saw" and Tyler Perry film franchises. The move, which reflects the increasingly tough environment for film financing, means that Lionsgate did not have the money it was counting on to finance the final three movies on its fiscal 2009 slate.

Shareholders of bailed-out bank Fortis have rejected the sale of the business to France's BNP Paribas. They voted -- by just 51% -- against a government rescue deal that would see BNP Paribas buy most of Fortis' Belgian banking and insurance operations and would make the French bank the largest in the euro zone by assets.

The Treasury had to pay a little more than expected Thursday to sell $14 billion in 30-year bonds, the final leg of a record three-part bond sale this week to fund Uncle Sam's soaring cash needs. At least investors showed up to buy -- as opposed to what happened in Mexico on Wednesday: The government of President Felipe Calderon had to pull a planned sale of 21-year bonds after investors balked.

The investors who are buying failed IndyMac Bank want to exploit its experience in dealing with a mountain of troubled mortgages by having the thrift sell loan-modification services to other financial firms. The Pasadena mortgage lender, which collapsed under the weight of bad loans in July, has been run since then under the name IndyMac Federal Bank by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.