Portfolio

Ratios of municipal to Treasury bond yields over the past three months have shown a degree of volatility that has complicated a standard valuation of tax-exempt debt for investors. Will that trend continue this year?

The Seattle-based broker-dealer is winding down. Its legal entity will retain its liability and assets, and D.A. Davidson will not take on its bond inventory.

Stocks capped a four-day rally with another sharp rally Friday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average stormed up 96.50 points to close at 12,720.48.

You’ve heard of structured products. These largely were (and are) complex securities based on lots of streams of cash in underlying loans whose flows were not well predicted. There was a credit crisis associated with them in 2008.

As tax time approaches, many clients are wondering what to do with their most highly appreciated assets. If they are charitably minded, those assets can be converted into reliable streams of income through charitable trusts.

You’ve heard of structured products. These largely were (and are) complex securities based on lots of streams of cash in underlying loans whose flows were not well predicted. Now come “synthetic” ETFs, where interest-rate swaps and other derivative products are used to replicate the performance of a securities index.

Muni yields have outperformed those of Treasuries by rallying four to five basis points on the intermediate and long ends of the curve throughout the holiday-shortened week. Meanwhile, equivalent Treasury yields backed up three to four basis points.

Interactive Brokers Group, which considered buying part or all of Jon Corzine's MF Global Holdings as it began to collapse in October, said it has begun segregating customer funds from house funds “on a daily basis.”

It’s the end of the week, you’re online and you’re just looking for something to make you laugh for a couple minutes. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Yes, the links have been pilfered straight from YouTube and you may have seen one or two of these before. But at least now they're all in one convenient location and also include links to some relevant news to help justify (sort of) all the guffaws. Without further adieu, here are five videos that should make any financial advisor chuckle.

U.S. stocks maintained their recent momentum Thursday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 45 points to 12,623.98 following a better-than-expected jobs report.