Alternative investments

Investment bank Rodman & Renshaw Capital Group has launched DirectMarkets, a first-of-its-kind platform that directly links stock issuers with investors, in primary offerings of securities.

Bullion is big. ETFs are convenient. Since its inception in November 2004, the average annual return of State Street Gold Shares has been 18.72%. By comparison, the S&P 500 has returned half of 1% a year in that time.

As voters in Florida head to the polls Tuesday to decide who will take on President Obama in November, you can bet many will be have another kind of change in mind. On average, the S&P 500 has improved 14% in the fourth year of a Democratic administration. But this year could be much different, based on statistics so far for the Obama term.

Direxion Funds said it is is making modifications to its line of “buy and hold” alternative strategies, effective February 1, 2012.

$10 billion of equities change hands each day in the United States. $4 trillion of currency changes hands each day, globally. Which asset do you want to trade in?

BNY Mellon has opened its first wealth management office in the Cayman Islands as part of an effort to expand the firm’s global capabilities to serve international clients, the wealth manager announced Wednesday.

State Street Global Advisors is not only going to sell its own funds and partner with other asset managers that do not have the regulatory wherewithal to go it alone.

Known as the Citi RAFI Bond Index Series, the series will include sovereign and corporate bond indices and use fundamental measures to weight the index components.

Investors pulled $4 billion out of exchange-traded funds that invested in emerging markets last year, making them the least popular form of ETFs in 2011.

Electronic alpha capture is poised to become a major workflow tool for every portfolio manager and broker-dealer to help prioritize insights gleaned from incoming data and options, a new report from Tabb Group indicates.

Firsthand Technology Value Fund announced that Facebook is now its largest holding, representing more than 5% of the fund’s net assets. Yelp, another social networking company, is also among the fund's top five holdings.

Exchange-traded funds are like stocks and mutual funds. Except they're not. Here's a glossary on how ETFs really operate.

Vanguard Chief Investment Officer Gus Sauter challenged the exchange-traded fund industry to be responsible in developing new products and also called for greater efforts to educate investors about ETFs.

You’ve heard of structured products. These largely were (and are) complex securities based on lots of streams of cash in underlying loans whose flows were not well predicted. There was a credit crisis associated with them in 2008.

The number of listed exchange-traded funds grew 20.6% in 2011 and the number of listed exchange-traded notes grew 53.8%, according to U.S. figures developed by the Exchange-Traded Fund Association.

With yield and risk investors' two biggest concerns today, Nuveen Investments has launched a microsite focusing exclusively on income (http://www.nuveen.com/income/default.aspx).

Drum roll, please.

Did you have the foresight to invest heavily for your clients in Pacific Investment Management Co.'s 25-year zero-coupon U.S. Treasury exchange-traded bond fund, one year ago?

Investors added $117.6 billion to their holdings in exchange-traded funds in 2011. That is almost identical to 2010, when they added $118.7 billion, and 2009, when they added $119.4 billion. But the value of their holdings only increased $51.4 billion, because the value of their shares fell, according to the Exchange Traded Fund Association.

Knight Capital Group has launched two actively managed exchange-traded funds run by subsidiary Astor Asset Management. The funds are the Astor Active Income ETF Fund and the Astor SP Growth ETF Fund.