Portfolio

Charles Schwab on Wednesday unveiled an eight-step plan to help people prioritize both their short-term and long-term savings objectives.

Of the 130,000 jobs that have been lost at financial services firms since the middle of last year, most have been at banks and brokerage firms. Mutual fund companies, so far, have held up because they’ve been buttressed by ongoing fees from customers retirement savings. In 2007, fund companies lost only 1.6% of their workforce, or 2,723 jobs.

A systems administrator who was laid off on Nov. 5 from an unnamed mutual fund company in New York wasn’t happy enough with the severance package the company gave him, Computerworld reports.

Money market mutual fund managers holding onto short-term debt they are unable to unload into the market will have to continue to hold on tight, because the Federal Reserve is not going to extend its $540 billion in loans to purchase the paper through the Money Market Investor Funding Facility until next month.

It’s not just plain-vanilla equity funds that investors are bailing out of. In the past two months, investors have redeemed 16% of assets from exchange-traded notes, bringing assets under management from a peak of $7.3 billion in June to $3.9 billion today, The Wall Street Journal reports. The rest of the decline is due to falling prices in commodity and currency ETNs.

Van Kampen Funds on Tuesday launched the family of Van Kampen Retirement Strategy Funds. The nine target-date funds, with target retirement dates in five-year increments between 2010 and 2050, plus a fund for those already retired, are based on investment strategies determined by Russell Investments and are designed to provide broader diversification and lower risk than other target-date funds.

American Century this week will inform 17% of its workforce, or 270 employees, that they are being let go due to the aftershocks of the credit crisis, declining assets due to redemptions and falling stock prices, and declining investor confidence and a weakening economy.

In a poll of bank wealth managers a day after Barack Obama was elected to become the 44th president of the United States, 50% said they expect their high-net-worth clients to be negatively impacted by the new administration, SEI found. Twelve percent said they expect a positive impact, but 38% said they were sure whether it will be positive or negative.

While the average equity mutual fund is down 48% and the average hedge fund is down 20% so far this year, one uncanny hedge fund manager, Bernard V. Drury of Drury Capital, has posted incredible year-to-date gains of 60%, The New York Times reports.

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