Practice

West Virginia and Nebraska offer the best 529 college savings plans, according to a ranking by SavingforCollege.com, a unit of Bankrate Inc., set to be released Friday.

WASHINGTON - Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab & Co. are suggesting state and federal securities regulators focus their auction-rate securities investigations on the major banks and broker-dealers that underwrote ARS rather than smaller brokerages that had no advance knowledge that the ARS market was going to collapse.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has unveiled its latest plan to make financial information far more accessible and easy to use.

While there has been growing talk of the aging of America, two National Bureau of Economic Research economists have now coined a term for it: “age inflation,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

William F. Galvin, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, has written a letter to Fidelity Chairman Edward C. Johnson III asking the firm to repurchase auction-rate securities that it sold to investors through its brokerage unit, Dow Jones reports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday that it made its first of four payments to the 1.5 million Putnam Investments who were harmed by market timing, paying $40 million to 600,000 investors. In all, the distributions will total $150 million.

A number of brokerage firms that sold auction-rate securities, including Fidelity Investments, do not think they should be forced to buy back the instruments, much as the investment banks that created them have been doing, to the tune of $40 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. Their thinking is that they were merely sellers of the ARS and didn’t have knowledge of their imminent demise, as the banks that ran the auctions did.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is reportedly investigating Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab over auction-rate securities, although it is unclear at this point over whether the probe is into sales or investment strategies.

Fidelity is expanding its three-year-old plan to “virtualize,” or standardize, its servers—so that there no longer is great a bond between data, applications, desktops and storage, and the underlying server and operating system infrastructure— focusing on both x86 and reduced-instruction-set computing, or RISC, servers, Network World reports.

Equity indexed annuities, which provide investors a portion of the market’s rise but do not decline in value when the market falls, have become increasingly popular among seniors.