UBS Shuttering High Profile Fund

December 13, 2002 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - The UBS Strategy Fund, whose initial investment totaled $2.1 billion, will be closed and merged with the UBS Global Equity Fund, according to a Dow Jones report.

The UBS board has submitted a recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission recommending the Strategy Fund be merged with the much smaller UBS Global Equity Fund.

UBS’s Global Equity Fund currently only has $58 million in net assets, but its three-year annualized return of minus 7% is a marked improvement over the Strategy Fund’s negative 24% return for the same period.

The Strategy Fund, which debuted in 1999 as the PaineWebber Strategy Fund, lost 31% of its value in its first full year of trading and never fully recovered.   Subsequent years have seen similar losses:   22% in 2003 and 21% year-to-date in 2002, according to Morningstar.com.

Assets, in what a 1999 company news release proclaimed “”the largest initial gathering of assets for any open-end equity mutual fund in mutual fund industry history,” have tumbled approximately 80% since 1999 to $417 million.

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