Money Management Executive Latest News

Over 90% of broker-dealers are planning on hiring retail brokers within the coming year, and none are in a complete hiring freeze, according to a study by BrokerHunter.com. Analysts, on the other hand are much less in demand, with only 5.6% of firms hiring and less than a quarter looking to add sales assistants.

The Financial Communications Society has announced the finalists for its annual best advertising contest and many of the candidates are mutual fund companies.

The Charles Schwab Corp. has announced multifaceted organizational changes, designed to "better match the way the company interacts with client segments and organizes and manages its products and services."

Morningstar announced Monday it will unveil 11 new mutual fund categories as part of a series of upgrades to the company’s investment methodology.

Wasatch Funds said it is launching the Wasatch Micro Cap Value Fund in late July. Initially, Wasatch plans to close the Micro Cap Value Fund to new investors at approximately $20 million in assets. The minimum initial investment in the Fund is $5,000 with a maximum contribution of $500,000.

Over the next five years, 500,000 jobs at American financial services firms will move overseas, according to a study by A.T. Kearney. Eight percent of the workforce will lose their jobs to offshore locations at mutual funds, banks, brokerages, and insurers. Companies anticipate saving $30 billion annually as job relocations begin to involve increasingly sophisticated positions within companies.

Equity index annuities (EIA) are complex and hard to explain, but investors may respond to one thing: these products have outperformed between 63% and 75% of mutual funds, according to a report from the Advantage Group. The analysis compares indexes of five different types of EIAs to performance data from Morningstar and Lipper for 2344 mutual funds. EIAs do not reinvest dividends, where mutual funds do.

Investment guru Warren Buffett warned investors that the time to buy into corporate junk bonds had passed, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Boston Private Financial Holdings said it has agreed to by an 80% stake in money manager Dalton, Greiner, Hartman, Maher & Co. for about $75 million, according to Reuters.

Pyxis Consulting said it has released iEnroll 529 version 4.0, which provides 529 plan managers with several online tools, techniques and services to drive enrollment and increase assets under management.