Money Management Executive Latest News

While there aren’t many frontier market indexes against which they can benchmark their investments, emerging-market funds are increasingly placing their bets on frontier markets, Dow Jones reports.

Of the nation’s 17 largest brokerage firms, discount firms continue to offer lower rates, Corporate Insight found. In fact, since the research company published its last Broker Monitor report in 2003, it found that a number of discount brokers have even lowered their rates.

When investors in 401(k) plans are given some kind of advice, whether it’s personal assistance in choosing their investment lineup, an advice tool or even a target-date fund that automatically adjusts holdings as an investor reaches closer to retirement, they enjoy higher returns, according to Charles Schwab.

At its open meeting on Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to continue allowing companies to bar shareholders from nominating directors on company ballots, although investors may continue to nominate directors or seek to change company bylaws by waging costly proxy campaigns on their own.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has promoted Kay Lackey to associate regional director for enforcement in the Commission’s New York regional office. Previously, she was an assistant regional director for enforcement in the office. She replaces Helene Glotzer, who has left the SEC to work in the private sector.

Model, or overlay, portfolio programs, in which an asset manager hands over their investment process to a third party manager or major distributor, such as a brokerage firm or bank, so that they are no longer running money, offers advantages to both investors and asset managers, according to the Money Management Institute.

Rather than analyzing emerging markets as a whole before recommending clients invest in them, David Riedel, founder of Riedel Research Group, which specializes in Latin America , Asia and central and eastern Europe, takes a bottom-up approach that goes a step further by analyzing individual companies, Forbes reports.

First Trust Portfolios is the first company to license the Dow Jones Global Select Dividend Index to launch an exchange-traded fund, the First Trust Dow Jones Select Dividend Index Fund, which began trading on the American Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Hearing a case of a 401(k) investor from Dallas who claimed his employer failed to execute an order, costing him $100,000, U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned business group arguments that 401(k) investors can only contest mismanagement of the plans through class-action lawsuits, Bloomberg reports.

Mutual fund companies are increasingly rolling out annuities and other retirement income products, competing head-to-head with insurance companies, the International Herald Tribune reports.