Money Management Executive Latest News

The Conference Board Measure of CEO Confidence rose to 67 in the first quarter, up from 62 in the fourth quarter—showing a measurable amount of faith in the economy since a reading above 50 indicates a positive outlook.

Sub-advised fund assets topped $1.7 trillion in 2010, an all-time high, Financial Research Corp. said.

State Street Global Advisors has launched a new exchange-traded fund based on a corporate bond index weighted according to three quantitative measures: return on assets, interest coverage and current ratio.

Companies paid out $19 billion in dividends in the first quarter of 2011, Standard & Poor’s said. And the number of companies increasing dividends rose 27.8% to 510, up from 399 in the first quarter of 2010.

Brokers and financial advisers looking to make more money and have more control over the type of clients they serve and the investments they recommend continued to flood the independent channel at a swift pace in 2010, according to a new Broker and Advisor Sentiment Index survey conducted on behalf of Fidelity Investments.

Long-term mutual funds took in $5.86 billion in the week ended March 30, the Investment Company Institute said.

ProShares has launched two inverse Treasury exchange-traded funds, the ProShares UltraShort 3-7 Year Treasury ETF and the ProShares Short 7-10 Year Treasury ETF.

Van Eck Global has launched the Market Vectors Germany Small-Cap ETF, which the firm says is the first exchange-traded fund dedicated solely to Germany. Van Eck also notes that Germany is Europe’s largest and the world’s fourth-largest economy. Germany’s GDP grew 3.6% in 2010.

Dreyfus has launched the Dreyfus Global Dynamic Bond Fund, a dynamically managed fund that seeks both capital appreciation and income by investing in bonds, currencies, derivatives and other instruments that provide exposure to these asset classes. The fund has no investment constraints and is not managed to a benchmark index. Rather, it seeks to deliver positive returns regardless of market moves.

AllianceBernstein, having expanded the diversification of its target-date funds earlier this year to mitigate the effects of inflation, has just issued a white paper discussing the importance of grappling with inflation risk.