Portfolio

Virtus Investment Partners is buying a 24% stake in Kleinwort Benson Investors International, Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kleinwort Benson Investors, which provides specialized equity strategies primarily to institutional investors.

Continuing its rapid expansion, CapTrust Financial Advisors, a large Raleigh, S.C. registered that serves private and institutional investors, acquired Freedom One Financial Group. Freedom One provides retirement plan and investment advisory services to companies in emerging markets.

Thomas Kane, a UBS financial advisor who ranks number 29 on our list, has turned to hedge funds, private equity and real estate to bolster his clients’ portfolios.

One day after Goldman announced that it was publishing daily “shadow values” of its money funds, J.P. Morgan Funds and BlackRock are also planning to publish net asset values for their own money funds.

The Vanguard Group today is following through with its plans to switch six international stock index funds to FTSE benchmarks by transitioning its Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund, which previously tracked the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, to the FTSE Emerging Transition Index, effective immediately.

What better way to celebrate stunning growth in assets under management than with another new fund?

BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, agreed to buy an exchange-traded funds unit from Credit Suisse Group AG to boost its presence in Switzerland.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management is currently prepping a master limited partnership fund to launch within the next few months

So much research comes out this time of year with many major firms cautiously offering their predictions for the new year that we wondered how they would stack up on the major issues. We’ve parsed through some of the larger reports from Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS, ING and Wells Fargo to track the top themes and condense it down. Here are some of their more interesting recommendations on global themes as well as some more local, unique investment ideas that they had to offer.

For the week ended Jan. 2, 2013, investors pulled an estimated $6.44 billion from funds that invest in long-term instruments, the second largest outflow in 2012.