Portfolio

Putnam Investments has developed a new website for financial advisers featuring sophisticated, open-architecture portfolio modeling tools (www.putnam.com/advisor). The site builds upon a series of practice management recommendations, links to Putnam’s social media sites, articles and videos of the company’s investment professionals discussing their investment outlook and the firm’s analytical tool FundVisualizer, which can model a portfolio from a universe of more than 11,000 mutual funds and ETFs.

Morningstar will begin ranking and researching managed ETF portfolios by the end of the year, the research firm announced at its second annual ETF Invest Conference in Chicago Thursday.

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index rose 0.3% in August, following a 0.6% gain in July and a 0.3% increase in June.

Long-Term funds netted $2.13 billion in the week ended Sept. 14, according to the Investment Company Institute.

Financial advisors and their wealthier clients will have a lot more separately managed alternative accounts to consider next year, according to a new study by Aite Group, the Boston-based independent financial industry research and advisory firm.

Fidelity Investments announced Wednesday it has received commitments for an additional $17 billion in 401(k) assets under management from 269 plans representing 315,000 participants. More than $15 billion of those assets are due to new sales, with the remaining $2 billion the result of mergers and acquisitions by existing clients.

A new report by the Investment Company Institute shows that over the past four months, a staggering $75 billion has been withdrawn from equity mutual funds.

Schwab's Advisor Services division has developed a suite of new resources to help financial advisors navigate the legal and regulatory issues that arise when making the transition to an independent Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) practice.

Mutual funds’ fair value procedures are holding up amid the unprecedented market volatility that has resulted from economic uncertainty, Middle East unrest and environmental disasters, Deloitte found in its Ninth Annual Fair Value Pricing Survey. This year’s survey queried executives at 79 asset management firms around the world with more than 3,300 fund offerings with $2.6 trillion in assets under management.

Fears over a possible economic slowdown, sovereign debt and not enough capitalization at U.S. financial institutions sent the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) Risk Index up 2.5 points to 110.5 in the second quarter. This is very close to the previous high reached in the third quarter of 2010.