Portfolio

Bank-based advisors produced an average $16,728 in December, up from just $14,712 in November.

Nearly two-thirds of current ETF owners bought the funds on their own. More than a quarter of them have advisors—they’re just not using them.

Cumberland Offers Safer Strategy

New York State will cease investigation into the December 2007 sale of auction-rate securities by UBS' former head of municipal securities.

Exchange-traded funds, once the province only of institutional investors, are increasingly resonating with wealthy investors, The Wall Street Journal reports.

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.