The mutual fund scandal of 2003 was the result of the discovery of illegal late trading and market timing practices on the part of certain hedge fund and mutual fund companies. Spitzer investigation On September 3, 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced the issuance of a complaint against New Jersey hedge fund company Canary Capital Partners LLC, charging that they had engaged in "late trading" in collusion with Bank of America's Nations Funds. Bank of America is charged with permitting Canary to purchase mutual fund shares, after the markets had closed, at the closing price for that day. Spitzer's investigation was initiated after his office received a ten-minute June 2003 phone call from a Wall Street worker alerting them to an instance of the late trading problem. Canary Capital settled the complaint for US$40 million, while neither admitting nor denying guilt in the matter. Bank of America stated that it would compensate its mutual fund shareholders for losses incurred by way of the illegal transactions. "Late trading" In the United States, mutual fund prices are set once daily at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. "Late trading" occurs when traders are allowed to purchase fund shares after 4:00 p.m. at that day's closing price. Under law, most mutual fund trades received after 4:00 p.m. must be executed at the following day's closing price, but because some orders placed before 4:00 p.m. cannot be executed until after 4:00 p.m., brokers can collude with investors and submit post-4:00 p.m. trades as if they had been placed before 4:00 p.m. In 2003 several mutual fund companies and stock brokerage firms engaged in a trading practice which guaranteed profits for the stock brokerage firm’s insider managers and preferred customers. To understand how this works, one needs to know how mutual funds shares are priced. Share values for mutual funds are not based upon bids from outside buyers. The price of a fund’s price was set in the evening based upon the value of the securities that it owned at the end of trading day, 4:00 PM Eastern Time. The law prohibited trading of mutual fund shares at any other price so the price set on Monday evening for a fund’s shares was available to anybody all day long on Tuesday until the market closed at 4:00 PM. Pension funds and hedge funds are faced with unpredictable big inflows of cash on any given day.