Money Management Executive Latest News

Fund companies continue to launch exchange-traded funds at an incredible rate. However, not all succeed in attracting enough assets to make them efficient investment products, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Investors have to weed out the ETFs that are genuinely useful to their portfolio.Unless an ETF has a large asset base and is actively traded, many investors are better off buying a comparable index mutual fund. In the first six months of this year, 162 ETFs were launched.

The Department of Labor estimates that automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans, as protected under the Pension Protection Act, will add between $45 billion to $90 billion a year to the plans, which had $3.6 trillion in assets under management in 2006, according to the Investment Company Institute.

While the market gyrations of the past couple of weeks have smarted, many financial advisers are telling their clients to remain with the, The Globe and Mail reports. In light of the fact that the markets have soared since 2003, many are simply calling the declines a market correction.

While TrimTabs reported that investors pulled the largest amount of money from the market in the week ended Wednesday, $19.86 billion, compared to the week after 9/11, when they took $16.5 billion off the table, the majority of the withdrawals are by large institutional investors, Dow Jones reports.

Although few economists believe there’s more than a 50% chance of a recession, the chorus of voices pointing to that possibility is growing, the Centre Daily Times reports.And there are three main factors that could cause that to happen, according to economists: how quickly banks resume readily granting consumers and businesses loans, whether housing prices continue to fall and whether the combination of those two factors puts the brakes on consumer spending.

The tumultuous debt market and concerns around the property markets are causing real estate mutual funds to take a beating, according to The Wall Street Journal.After seven year of remarkable gains, REITs are showing huge losses. Some funds are posting losses of 15% over just the past month.

The State Bank of India, India’s largest bank, is going to start to sell Fidelity mutual funds through its network of 9,500 branches, according to the Associated Press. The agreement was signed last week by Fidelity’s International’s Indian subsidiary.

Individual investors were surprised but grateful for the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut discount interest rates by 50 basis points to 5.75% last week, and mutual funds managers were just as pleased with the decision, according to Dow Jones.

TIAA-CREF has launched a new $50 million advertising campaign centered around a simple idea that it hopes will differentiate itself from other financial services companies: its dot-org status, The New York Times reports. In conjunction with this, it has also launched a new website, powerof.org.

So-called target-date and target-risk asset allocation funds portend to make investing easier for 401(k) participants, but the proliferation of these products in recent years can make choosing which to offer a headache for sponsors.