Money Management Executive Latest News

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J.P. Morgan Asset Management has hired James Gearin as chief operating officer of its retirement plan services business, reporting to the unit’s CEO, David Musto.

Invictus Consulting Group has created a bank stress test service for hedge funds that rates the valuation of bank stocks in relation to their peers. It also stress tests banks’ Tier 1 capital reserves two years out. By comparison, banks’ stress tests are handled in house, Invictus noted.

401(k) investors and sponsors are likely to stand up and take notice of the fees that will be clearly presented to them in April, particularly the fact that investors pay most of the administration fees. These administration fees, or expense ratios, cover not just fund management but also recordkeeping, auditing and broker commissions.

Despite their reputation for taking advantage of upsets in the markets, hedge funds wisely ran for the exit from stocks between 2007 and 2009, according to a report by Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business Assistant Professor of Business Itzhak Ben-David. Ben-David conducted the study along with Rabih Moussawi of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Francesco Franzoni of the Swiss Finance Institute and the University of Lugano.

Investors have developed a serious aversion to U.S. equity mutual funds, which is upsetting the balance of fund flows, according to Morningstar.

The correlation between stocks and the S&P 500 has reached a 20-year high of 0.73, up from 0.44 in July—posing a real challenge for individual fund managers, according to Goldman Sachs.

Both the Conference Board and the State Street confidence indexes plummeted in August, with the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index falling 14.7 points from July, to a reading of 44.5, and the State Street Investor Confidence Index declining by 12.9 points, to 89.6.

BlackRock has filed to create proprietary indexes for its iShares exchange-traded funds. The indexes will be "transparent to the public," the exemptive order says, indicating the indexes could be for actively managed ETFs.

Exchange-traded fund assets rose 0.8% in July to $1.086 trillion, up from $1.077 trillion in June, the Investment Company Institute reports. Assets rose 32% from $821 billion a year ago, July 2010.