Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

It may have taken almost 18 years for the combined assets of exchange-traded funds to surpass a trillion dollars. But it should only take another three years to top the second trillion.

SEC and CFTC rulemaking will define “the workload for the coming year,’’ said Karrie McMillan, general counsel of the Investment Company Institute as its mutual funds conference opened Monday in California. But where that work will end up cannot yet be determined.

The selling of investments to individual investors and their purchases of them are mired in dysfunction, according to the former director of conduct risk and sector leader for asset management of the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom.

Eileen Rominger, in her first appearance as the SEC's director of investment management division before a gathering of members of the mutual fund industry’s largest trade group, said that compliance with existing and forthcoming rules as well as robust regulation of these is essential to achieving and maintaining the trust and confidence of investors.

The establishment of a fiduciary standard that applies to how broker-dealers should care for their customers is not likely to come until after the one-year anniversary date of passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act that required it.

The U.S. Attorney for southern Florida and the FBI on Thursday charged a one-time entrepreneurial whiz kid who already has spent time behind bars for fraud with manipulating the stock of a public company. Using, among Internet-related communication mechanisms, YouTube.

Chairman Mary L. Schapiro said Wednesday the SEC should consider making reviews of automated systems used in the exchange of stocks and other investments mandatory. The mandate would be an outgrowth of Automation Review Policies issued a quarter century ago, after the Black Monday crash on Wall Street in 1987.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority expelled MICG Investment Management of Newport News, Va., and barred its chief executive and majority owner, Jeffrey A. Martinovich, from the securities industry.

A well-prepared professional approaches turbulence and dire conditions that present themselves calmly and confidently, performance consultant Dr. Rick Jensen told attendees of the Bank Investment and Securities Association in the closing keynote Tuesday.

Last year, wirehouses were hot. This year, they are not. At least not with banks trying to recruit additional registered representatives.

"No amount of government stimulus will prevent it,'' said forecaster Harry S. Dent Jr. That's because additional stimulus, driven by more federal borrowing, will have less and less effect on the economy, much like the dwindling effect of more cocaine on a crack addict, he said.

The “supply shock” created by internal strife in Libya"won't break the sustainability of this recovery," Dreyfus chief economist Richard Hoey told the Bank Insurance and Securities Association conference Sunday, in an opening keynote.

Criminal charges were filed Thursday against a former financial advisor at UBS Financial Services whom the Securities and Exchange Commission charged with siphoning $3.3 million from investors to pay for luxury cars, prostitutes and gambling debts.

Financial services firms are being specifically targeted in Web attacks by "criminal elements," according to Edward Powers, a principal at Deloitte & Touche. Those attackers “know what assets they’re going after and they’re going after you in a very orchestrated way,’’ he said at a meeting of the Wall Street Technology Association.

The two marriage partners did not describe this as a ‘merger of equals.’ Deutche Borse shareholders, after all, will have 60% control. But NYSE Euronext chief executive Duncan Niederauer says it’s not a takeover. So what is it?

The savings are part of a $500 million initiative to rationalize trading operations which could mean that as many as 3,000 people associated with JPMorgan Chase trading would lose their jobs or be redeployed inside the company.

There's a post-retirement crisis coming. But research indicates that the very individuals that most need guaranteed income in their lives are most resistant, according to Shlomo Benartzi, an expert in how human behavior affects the financing of human lives.

"Social media" is not just some amorphous glob of communications outlets to be employed or avoided. Here's the quick setup to get going with a strategy to use social technologies effectively.

It used to be that a mutual fund was a pretty easy product to launch. Line up a set up securities. Buy. Hold. Mix occasionally. Now, managing products such as target-date funds present serious operational challenges, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Asset Management Americas said

Most projections call for financial services firms to boost tech spending this year by 5% or less. Then, there's Brad Lyman, director of technology at Matthews International Capital Management, and a more robust estimate today at the National Investment Company Service Association 2011 Conference & Expo.