Portfolio

American Funds has sold $187 million, or 99% of its original $190 million, holdings via three mutual funds in PetroChina shares, a company Investors Against Genocide has railed against for funding genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The latest SEC filings show the fund company’s holdings as of Dec. 31 at a mere $2.7 million.

Firms need to beef up customer service staffing and most of them are woefully unprepared for these changes.

Cambridge Investment Research’s 1,600 financial advisors are independent contractors who run their own businesses nationally, but legislation introduced in both the House and Senate has threatened that model.

Transamerica Life Insurance Co. has enhanced the guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit schedule for its Retirement Income Choice 1.2 and Retirement Income Choice 1.4 annuity riders. Each rider now pays one percentage more a year.

Investment managers are cautiously optimistic about stocks in the coming year but more guarded about bonds, Towers Watson found in a survey of 98 managers with $13.3 trillion of assets under management. They foresee economic growth, albeit modestly.

Investment managers around the world are cautiously optimistic about stocks in the coming year but more guarded about bonds, Towers Watson found in a survey of 98 managers with $13.3 trillion of assets under management. They foresee economic growth, albeit modestly.

When Mary Schapiro took office as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, she faced a myriad of issues related to the financial crisis—and outlined a series of new regulations that, so far, have come up short, The Washington Post reports.

BlackRock isn’t satisfied with its December 2009 acquisition of Barclays Global Investors, according to a Daily Mail of London report. Now the $2.7 trillion investment giant is considering buying hedge fund manager of managers Man Group.

Charles Schwab is attracting a slew of new assets, and daily average trades are rising. New and established clients brought the company $6 billion of net new assets in January, according to its monthly market activity report. Total client assets rose 27% from a year earlier, to $1.401 trillion, but were down 2% from December because of difficult market conditions.

Tom O’Halloran, manager of the Lord Abbett Developing Growth Fund, a small-cap fund that has increased 43% over the past year and 5.5% over the past decade—putting it in the top 3% of its peers, believes technology stocks will lead a continued market rebound.