Portfolio

The Department of Labor last week endorsed a proposal in the House of Representatives that would allow 401(k) investors to receive advice from employer-sponsored financial planners, giving the initiative renewed momentum and prompting its proponents to assert that the House will pass it by year end.

The American Stock Exchange has created a new business unit to pursue new opportunities for exchange-traded funds and capitalize off of ETF product development, the company announced last week.

As fall approaches, Thomas Clough, the president of New York Life Benefit Services, is excitedly readying a team of marketers to walk into office buildings and talk to workers of all ages and all incomes about their 401(k) plans.

The mutual fund industry has historically showed its resilience to competitive products and predictions of its demise have always proven false. So it is not likely that several products that have gained recent attention from investors and the financial media will spell the end of the fund industry, said industry executives speaking at the Morningstar Investment Conference last week.

In the burgeoning business of socially responsible investing, companies sometimes employ the help of a board of advisors in choosing stocks. The boards are often made up of experts with commanding resumes. They include professors, politicians and philanthropists.

NEW YORK - With poor investment management, the mutual fund industry has opened the door for alternative products like Web folios, separately-managed accounts, and exchange-traded funds, according to John Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group of Malvern, Pa. However, with a return to sound management based on the fundamental principles of investing, mutual funds should be able to fend off these challengers, he said. Bogle spoke here last week at a forum on use of the Internet in financial services sponsored by Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass.

E*TRADE Group of Menlo Park, Calif. has signed an agreement with Standard & Poor's of New York to offer online investors 21 predesigned "baskets" of stocks, to be called E*TRADE Stock Baskets.

State Street Global Alliance, a jointly-owned subsidiary of State Street Global Advisors and State Street Corporation, all of Boston, will develop and sell alternative investment products, including hedge funds, and has acquired hedge fund manager, RXR Group of Stamford, Conn., the company announced last week.

New York Life Investment Management LLC of Parsippany, N.J., has announced that it will offer three new funds for institutional investors.

By issuing exchange-traded shares of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund last Thursday, the Vanguard Group of Malvern, Pa. may have compromised its brand name and reputation of being a product innovator, not a product marketer, according to some industry observers.