Alternative investments

Van Eck Global has launched the Van Eck Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund, a mutual fund designed to give investors exposure to a variety of investment strategies, including absolute-return and hedge style strategies.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is asking brokers and registered investment advisers to provide it with information on the sale of leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds between Oct. 1, 2008 and March 30 to investors who held them for 10 business days or longer. The authority is looking for all sales and marketing materials, customer communications and complaints, arbitration claims and written supervisory procedures regarding the sale of such funds.

Sustainable Asset Management has launched the SAM Sustainable Global Active Fund, an all-cap international equity fund that relies on SAM’s research methodology that takes economic, social and environmental factors into consideration.

Russell Investments has launched the Russell Frontier Markets Equity Fund, which will invest primarily in emerging markets at the forefront of development. However, the fund also has the license to invest some money in companies stationed in more developed nations but that have a significant proportion of operations in frontier markets.

Financial planners’ high-net-worth clients are asking for guidance on investing and spending, as they reassess their holdings following the devastation of 2008, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants found in a survey.

While the financial services industry largely embraced most of the Obama administration's financial services overhaul, the idea of removing money funds' $1 net asset value is causing widespread concern in the mutual fund industry.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has fined seven firms a total of $184,500, including $80,000 for Tulsa-based BOSC Inc., for failing to timely or accurately report municipal securities, unfairly pricing bonds, as well as other muni and non-muni rule violations.

At the hearing on target-date funds that the Department of Labor and the Securities and Exchange Commission held in Washington last Thursday, the focus was on better disclosure of holdings.

WASHINGTON - Many investment industry leaders are worried that the proposed 401(k) fee disclosure regulations currently being pushed through Congress will actually increase the fees investors pay and increase their confusion.

After active managers fell in lockstep with their benchmarks and all of the major indexes in 2008, many institutional investors are paring back their investments with active managers in favor of low-cost passive alternatives, The Wall Street Journal reports.

After having raised only $500 million in the past two years, Fidelity Equity Partners, a private equity subsidiary, will be closed next month.

With Putnam Investments, Legg Mason and Invesco AIM recently rolling out absolute-return funds that promise an upside regardless of the market’s condition, some wonder if that is possible.

High-net-worth investors are reordering their priorities when selecting investment providers, according to “New Horizon, New Behavior,” a study of 2,100 investors released by Barclays Wealth.

Although there have been reports of one-third of employers cutting back on or eliminating 401(k) matches, for the most part, they have continued to add other features to the plans to increase participation and investment rates, Charles Schwab found. And that has helped most workers stay the retirement savings course.

NEW YORK -- Investors tend to stay quiet about financial products they don't understand as long as the profits keep coming in, but when the tide goes out and profits fall, they want answers.

A recent cartoon in The New Yorker surely sums up many retirement investors' feelings toward their financial advisers: It depicts them being sacrificed to a volcano.

Before the bottom fell out of the markets last year, most asset management firms thought they already had robust risk management processes in place. Now they're not so sure.

ALPS Fund Services is planning to offer five commodity equity exchange-traded funds. They are: Agricultural Producers ETF, Energy Producers ETF, Industrial Metals Products ETF, Precious Metals Products ETF and Commodity Producers Composite ETF.

Grail Advisors is planning to offer four actively managed exchange-traded funds that will the first to use a single-manager approach.

IndexIQ has introduced an exchange-traded fund that will seek to replicate global macro and emerging markets hedge fund strategies.