Money Management Executive Latest News

The Department of Labor is dropping a rule proposed during the final days of the Bush administration that would have allowed 401(k) providers to offer advice to investors even if it involved a plan in which its own funds were sold.

Fifty-one percent of younger adults are thinking more seriously about retirement planning after watching the recession’s impact on their parents, Country Financial found in a survey. Evidently, these investors believe it is critical to stay on top of their finances and retirement savings, since 71% said they expect to experience a second similar recession by the time they reach their parents’ age, and 60% believe their financial situation will be the same or worse in retirement as their parents.

John Hancock Retirement Plan Services has formed a distribution partnership with Edward Jones that makes Hancock’s 401(k) platform, complete with the Guaranteed Income For Life feature, available to the brokerage’s 12,000 financial advisers.

More than 100 investors with money trapped in the Reserve Yield Plus Fund have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to reserve the permission it gave to Reserve Funds to delay redemption requests in order to liquidate holdings in an orderly market, The Wall Street Journal reports. The investors have been waiting for their remaining $175 million for the past year. The fund once held $1.2 billion.

Technology exchange-traded funds were some of the biggest sellers during the dot-com mania of 10 years ago, even as they loaded up on Internet companies without profits.

Exchange-traded funds continued to take in money in August, but inflows slowed to $5.5 billion, down from $13.5 billion the month before.

Forward Management has launched the Forward Tactical Growth Fund, a mutual fund that will try to take advantage of market inefficiencies all the while minimizing downside volatility, by taking long, short of neutral market positions on individual securities, sectors or entire markets. Broadmark Asset Management is sub-advisor to the fund, which is a 40 Act version of a similar separately managed account the two firms already offer.

Wirehouses are projected to lose $188 billion in client assets this year due to adviser migration, according to a new report from Cerulli Associates. And those losses are expected to continue over the longer term as well.

With the collapse of Lehman Brothers a year in the past and the economy on the road to recovery, many participants in the financial services industry are questioning whether the industry still needs to undergo substantial regulatory change, and what changes, if any, could be beneficial at this point.

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