Portfolio

On the heels of Bill Gross’ latest active exchange-traded fund, BlackRock has thrown its hat into the active ETF space with a proposed offering of its own.

Nuveen Fund Advisors and GuideStone Funds garnered the top group honors at the 2012 U.S. Lipper Fund Awards.

Thanks to stagnant interest rates and lingering worries over the Eurozone and other developed markets, the exchange traded fund market in February grew 3.9%, or more than $44 billion assets, over the previous month, according to a snapshot report released by State Street Global Advisors.

The exchange-traded product market reached $1.72 trillion of assets at the end of February, up 12.8 percent year to date, according to the ETF Landscape report issued by the BlackRock Investment Institute.

The San Francisco company has not made it easy for fund families to work through its online platform, featuring five incompatible sites. That's about to change, with an Investment Manager Gateway.

Palm Beach Gardens, Fl.-based Lighthouse Partners, a fund-of-hedge-funds and managed account investment adviser, has taken a minority stake in 361 Capital, a Denver-based provider of alternative investment mutual funds, separate accounts, and limited partnerships to institutions, financial intermediaries, and high-net-worth investors.

''The new normal is that we are in transition, we are in transformation and we don't know where we're heading,'' according to Lazaro Campos, chief executive of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

So you want to tap into the global markets and find new opportunities for growth.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tacked on another 14 points to finish at 12,922.02 Friday following a better-than-expected government jobs report and word that Greece completed its debt restructuring negotiations to avoid an immediate default.

Covered bonds — dual recourse bonds that are popular in Europe but have seen little domestic issuance — may yet take hold in the U.S., according to a PIMCO report.