Portfolio

FINRA Raises Margin Requirements On Leveraged ETFs

Regulators are looking for ways to increase accounting safeguards for investment advisors who have custody of client assets, but an investment advisor's group says some of the proposed changes are too broad and go too far.

BlackRock made a big splash in the exchange-traded funds business this summer with its $13.5 billion purchase of the investment unit of Barclays Global Investors, and analysts and executives are waiting for the next shoe to drop.

When like-named target-date funds experienced a wide range of investment returns in 2008, regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor took notice.

Assets in money market funds fell $21.35 billion to $3.559 trillion in the week ended Aug. 26, the Investment Company Institute said.

The mutual fund industry is known for churning out “hot-dot” funds that follow the latest investment craze, but as The Wall Street Journal notes in a recent column, it’s hard to believe but there are fewer than 10 small-cap emerging markets funds available.

Harris Associates, the Investment Company Institute, the Mutual Fund Directors Forum and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fired their first salvos in the Supreme Court fee case through separate briefs, claiming that market forces and diligent fund trustees keep fees low and negotiated at “arm’s length” bargaining between the investment advisor and the board. They also argue that due to the greater service afforded to retail investors, institutional fees are understandably lower.

OppenheimerFunds has hired William C. Carey as head of distribution and Martha B. Willis as chief marketing officer, to help the firm respond to a rapidly changing industry and to streamline marketing and distribution functions across the firm’s various business lines and out to clients.

Katherine “Kit” Addleman, regional director of the Atlanta office of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will leave the SEC after 20 years of service in late October to become a partner with Haynes and Boone.

Many investors are still too afraid to get back into the stock market, and their hesitancy is putting a drag on the market’s resurgence, the Chicago Tribune reports.