Portfolio

More than three in four advisors expect to continue selling variable annuities and allocate 11% of their assets under management toward these products, according to Cogent Research.

Anchor Capital Advisors will hire Michael C. Pierre as portfolio manager and acquire the client accounts that he manages from Moody Aldrich Partners.

BMO Asset Management is changing the investment objectives of several ETFs. The biggest change involves switching two of the ETFs to more recognized indices. In both cases, the firm is moving from Dow Jones indices to S&P benchmarks.

Henry Blodget, former cheerleader for the dot-com bubble and now editor-in-chief of The Business Insider website, names the big fund managers that got taken to the cleaners with the Facebook IPO in an article published yesterday.

Assets of institutional money market funds increased by $13.17B in the last week, the third largest inflow of institutional money since the end of March.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 85.33 points Thursday to finish at 13,250.11 while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 added 31.46 points and 9.98 points, respectively.

Closed-end fund assets increased $1.61B during Q2. Equity fund assets decreased by $1.5B to $96.21B, and bond fund assets increased by $3.11B to $153.39B.

The world’s largest asset manager will use software from Hewlett-Packard to speed development of applications for Aladdin, its investment management platform.

Individual investors like what they see in long-term muni bond mutual funds and so have been pouring more money into them in 2012 than they have in years.

Defined contribution plan sponsors need to do a better job communicating key information to participants, according to a survey of plan participants.