Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

Financial planners and investment advisors are moving broadly and quickly to adopt the Windows 7 operating system for their personal computers as well as the Apple iPad for their personal use, according to preliminary results of the 2010 Software Survey released Sunday at the Financial Planning Association's annual conference by Financial Planning magazine and virtual office consultant Joel Bruckenstein.

Equity markets in the United States suffered their second consecutive month of volume dropping more than 20 percent compared to a year ago. Daily volume is off 40 percent from May, the month of the market's Flash Crash.

A state regulator publicly released confidential information on thousands of customers of Morgan Keegan & Co., the investment banking and brokerage firm, the Wall Street Journal reported

Temenos said late Monday that it will acquire Odyssey Financial Technologies, a supplier of front- and middle-office software for private banking, wealth management and investment management.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch said it is forming a Global Futures and Derivatives Clearing Services group ”in anticipation of the substantial growth in OTC derivatives clearing.”

The exit of capital from mutual funds in the United States has slowed down, but showed signs of picking up steam again this month.

Many investment firms dealing in complex asset-backed securities did not have sufficient computing capacity to figure out the risks they were taking, as the global financial crisis unfolded, said the managing director and chief technology architect of Bank of America Merrill Lynch Monday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Friday approved the expansion of its post-Flash Crash circuit breaker program to include all stocks in the Russell 1000 Index and a test group of exchange-traded funds.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged a Colorado investment adviser with deceiving elderly clients about the safety of putting their money into hedge funds.

The SEC is likely to revise its approach to circuit breakers to include a “careful review” of price bands that limit how far up or down the price of a stock can move at any given time.

Money manager Stanley Druckenmiller, who at one point helped devalue the British pound, is shutting down his investment advisory firm Duquesne Capital Management, after 30 years.

High-frequency traders are “market jackals” and not market makers, in increasingly electronic markets, JonesTrading Institutional Services said in a White Paper released Tuesday.

Ameriprise Financial Inc. plans to reduced the lineup of mutual funds run by Columbia Management, but step up marketing and add jobs, according to a report in the Boston Globe.

Fiserv said it hired former JPMorgan Chase executive Sean Gallagher as president of its Investment Services division.

The Tuition Plan Consortium said Monday it re-launched Independent 529 Plan as Private College 529 Plan, to foster pre-purchasing of tuition fees as present rates. The consortium said its Private College 529 Plan will offer investors a way to lock in tuition rates at more than 275 private colleges and universities.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow the use of "flash orders" in options markets.

The head of the BlackRock product team for exchange-traded funds is urging the SEC and CFTC to establish circuit breakers across all exchanges that were uniform for both stocks and ETFs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at such mechanisms as price collars and limits on upward or downward movements in a stock in a single day, in the wake of the May 6th "flash crash."

A crash that can send the overall average of blue chip stocks down 1,000 points in 10 minutes, and where individual stocks can lose more than 90 percent of their value in 10 seconds, remains a looming risk to capital markets, according to the chief financial officer of Accenture, the large global consulting firm.

A monumental shift is taking place in the mutual fund industry as wholesalers move to mobile apps for smartphones and tablet computers - en masse.