Practice

Putnam Investments has unveiled a redesigned website that provides advisors with advanced portfolio modeling capabilities, practice-management resources and a social media component for sharing and surveying information on Twitter and Facebook.

Guggenheim Partners and Rydex/SGI announced that Guggenheim will acquire Rydex in the first quarter of 2012 and combine its asset management capabilities under the name Guggenheim Investments. Once the deal is closed, Guggenheim Investments will have $119 billion of assets under management. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Fidelity Investments racked up defined contribution commitments in the first half of the year totaling 315,000 participants, 269 plans and $17 billion in assets under administration, the company says.

While the recent FPA Convention provided some new and very interesting presentations and introduced some pretty high-brow concepts, Financial Planning columnist Bob Veres felt far too many of the presentations were bogged down by speakers who decided -- or were compelled -- to “dumb down” the material to appeal to the lowest common denominator. What did you think?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is no longer going to be a wholesaler of publicly reported data, according to an assistant chief counsel. There will now be an 'enormous focus' on data on derivatives and other products that until now has not been otherwise available.

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.

Planning to maximize Social Security benefits is becoming a service that clients expect advisors to provide, according to a new survey from a Nebraska-based software provider.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the proposal of a new rule designed “to prohibit certain material conflicts of interest between those who package and sell asset-backed securities (ABS) and those who invest in them.”

Janus Capital Group has unveiled a new online retirement income distribution tool aimed at helping financial advisers keep their clients’ retirement income evenly flowing for more than 30 years.

Most major corporations have "significant security gaps that leave sensitive board-level information open to information theft and hacking," according to the governance, risk and compliance unit of Thomson Reuters.