Investment insights

Direxion has launched two leveraged exchange-traded funds that track Japanese equity market performance.

Following a bearish May, investor confidence shot up in June, according to the State Street Global Investor Confidence Index released Tuesday.

Investors remain wary of the financial sector, which is bad news for advisors. But by examining the best practices of successful advisors, we can all learn valuable lessons about how to strengthen trust and build greater public confidence.

Right now, hedge funds cannot technically advertise to anyone. They cannot solicit potential investors — they must find a way to cleverly (but legally) inspire accredited investors to come to them, ask questions, and hope they’ll stick around. It’s not an easy business by any means, but with the potential to make billions of dollars a year; enterprising individuals are frequently attracted to the industry.

To evolve and succeed, advisors have to make the transition from practitioners to business owners. As a result we've seen larger firms arising as advisors attempt to add scalability.

Sessions at the 25th annual Morningstar Investment Conference covered a range of topics from actively managed ETFs, closed-end funds and alternatives to strategies to boost retirement income and solutions to the “yield conundrum.” Here is a baker's dozen of the smartest things we heard at the conference.

Advisors may soon see lower fees for liquid alternative asset funds – hedge fund mutual funds – thanks to the push by hedge fund managers to market these plans more aggressively into the defined contribution space, according to panelists at last week's 25th annual Morningstar Investment Conference.

Scottrade emerged as the top-rated firm in J.D. Power & Associates 2013 U.S. Self-Directed Investor Satisfaction Study, but overall investor satisfaction with self-directed firms declined from last year.

Ron O’Hanley, Fidelity Investment’s president of asset management and corporate services, laid out his take on a number of economic trends through a game of red light/green light led by Morningstar’s head of global research Scott Burns.

Despite a challenging environment in the hunt for yield, three prominent money managers told advisors and investors that it is possible to do better than the historically low rates many have settled for.

Irascible investing legend John Bogle questioned whether target-date mutual funds are the right retirement investment choice in all cases.

The most important thing an advisor can do for clients is to integrate their investment portfolios with the rest of their financial needs, according to Morningstar’s director of global fund research.

Most emerging-market stocks fell as Brazil’s Ibovespa sank a day after entering a bear market, while investors weighed prospects for global stimulus measures.

Though they face similar challenges in preparing for their financial futures, men and women think about and respond to them in divergent ways, according to research released Wednesday as part of Northwestern Mutual’s ongoing 2013 Planning and Progress Study.

Most planners do a lot more than select investments. So how do you measure the value of providing financial planning?

Today we say that to be a canary in a coal mine is to be a warning to others. I couldn’t imagine a more fitting analogy then to say Japan is the canary for the U.S. And, fellow coalminers, Japan has stopped chirping.

Shares of discount brokers are gaining the most since 2003 compared with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, a sign that small investors are joining the four-year bull market even after U.S. stocks suffered their biggest losses in six months.

U.S. bond funds suffered their second-worst withdrawals last week in more than two decades after speculation about an eventual end to the Federal Reserve’s bond purchases sent fixed-income markets lower.

Are you a wirehouse advisor with at least $93 million in assets under management? Then you are the kind of advisor asset management distributors most want to reach.

“There’s a huge shift this year from last year in overall optimism from the advisors,” says Mark Schoenbeck, senior vice president of marketing for Curian Capital, the asset management firm that conducted the 2013 Curian Capital Survey. “It was a pretty big swing.”