Practice

Affluent pre-retirees with investable assets of at least $100,000 are more comfortable staying in the market than they were two years ago, a report from Phoenix Marketing International shows.

Societe Generale, the French investment bank, says that its new “relative value” algorithm will give fund managers the ability to change their participation to a stock’s performance relative to an underlying index.

Marketing expert Marie Swift says the “Marketing Ideas, Rapid Fire” session at the recent Garrett Planning Network annual retreat yielded a bunch of winning marketing ideas for financial advisors. Which ones can you or your firm implement right now?

High-net-worth investors are focused on preserving wealth rather than taking short-term risks in today’s volatile markets.

What is there to do on LinkedIn everyday? As it turns out, there are several powerful free tools that can help advisors market their practices as well as help them search effectively for new clients. Financial Planning senior editor Donna Mitchell says that planners who aren’t taking advantage of these functions (remember: they’re free) probably should be.

Mercer’s U.S. outsourcing business has begun including retirement income from Financial Engines in its defined contribution platform. Financial Engines says its Financial Engines Income+ is the first retirement income solution designed specifically for 401(k) plans.

U.S. households held $10.7 trillion in retirement assets at the end of 2010, according to a pair of retirement industry analysts who culled information from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds report and U.S. Census data. This is just above the previous high of $10.5 trillion reached in 2007, and a big climb from the $2.4 trillion loss in retirement assets in the crash of 2008, when these assets fell to $8.1 trillion.

Four of the world’s largest investment banks – Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and J.P. Morgan --- are now live on a new electronic margin call system called MarginSphere.

Financial planning and reporting technology provider Adaptive Planning has introduced its Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 Releases, which feature new reporting capabilities, SaaS and enterprise collaboration features.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but there are demographic similarities, and a program manager should be able to identify them.