Portfolio

Young investors may not have much, if anything, to lose in the stock market, but seeing their parents and grandparents suffer from the market declines following the dot-com crash and then the credit crisis over the past 10 years has taken a severe toll on their risk appetite, The Denver Post reports.

The average 401(k) balance is back at the level it was in 2004, according to a report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute—essentially wiping out the past five years of investing.

The average return of U.S. equity mutual funds in the second quarter, a stunning 19.77%, was certainly welcome news, but it gave investors absolutely no reason to believe the stock market was turning around. After all, what fundamentals were there?

Hedge funds continue to do well, rising 2.4% in July, bringing year-to-date returns to nearly 12%, according to HedgeFund.net. In fact, it’s the best first seven months of the year for hedge funds in a decade.

Stocks entered a new bull market in March, and the S&P 500 could rise an additional 10% by the end of the year, Abby Joseph Cohen, senior investment strategist at Goldman Sachs, said on CNBC.

While 46% of plan sponsors have or are planning to decrease 401(k) matches for rank-and-file employees, budgets are increasing for 401(a) profit-sharing plans, usually offered to higher-paid workers, Diversified Investment Advisors found in a survey of 279 employers with 1,000 or more employees.

Labaton Sucharow has filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against ProShares, regarding one of its inverse leveraged exchange-traded funds.

Alternative assets under management fell 37.25% from a year earlier, to $2.496 trillion as of March 31, according to a survey.

The RBC Consumer Attitudes and Spending Household (CASH) Index rose by a sharp 15.1 points in August to 37.5, reversing a slide of the previous two months.

Many mutual funds geared toward a special type of socially responsible investing, green investing, are outpacing the Dow and the S&P 500, BusinessWeek reports. And given the environmentally conscious and alternative energy initiatives of the new president, valued at more than $80 billion, they could continue to outpace the general markets.