Portfolio

Fidelity will buy back $300 million worth of auction-rate securities from its brokerage customers, according to the Associated Press, citing an individual close to the talks. In so doing, it will settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and the announcement could possibly be made this afternoon.

Janus Twenty Fund manager Ron Sachs must be ruing purchasing nearly 10 million shares in Lehman Brothers, now that the company is either on the brink of collapse or a fire sale, the Rocky Mountain News reports. The stock is down nearly 80% since the beginning of June.

Bruce Bent, chairman of The Reserve and the creator of the first money market mutual fund, is breaking from the pack that has been critical of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal of the rule governing money funds to lessen their reliance on credit rating agencies, Dow Jones reports.

Financial services, insurance, and real estate businesses’ hiring plans for the fourth quarter are the weakest they have been in 16 years, as a result of a contracting banking sector and the slumping housing market, a survey by Manpower found.

Although unemployment and inflation have been higher in the past 30 years, a majority of people age 60 or older have a very pessimistic outlook, according to a poll by the MetLife Mature Market Institute.

With Japanese households worth more than $14 trillion, and half of that in cash or postal accounts, Manulife Financial Corp. has decided to enter the nation’s mutual fund market.

Edward Jones will pay $7.5 million to California to settle claims that it failed to disclose its revenue-sharing policies to investors. Although it earlier denied the attorney general’s charges, in settling, the firm neither admitted to nor denied the allegations.

While American Funds and Vanguard raked in $74 billion apiece in 2007, Fidelity Investments netted $2 billion, according to Strategic Insight data. It was the first time in 20 years Fidelity didn’t rank in the top 25 fund houses in terms of net sales.

Anxious to do business in the world’s third-largest economy, where the population is aging, The Hartford is expanding into Germany.

Among the largest hedge funds, 35% are in the red so far this year, Hedge Fund Research data shows, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. As a group, their assets are down 4.3%, and among all of the listings in Hedge Fund Research’s Fund Weighted Composite Index benchmark, they are down 0.75%. This is the first half-yearly decline in the index since the group started it in 1990.