Special Program Root Tag

Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, and Merrill Lynch, without admitting to wrongdoing, have agreed to pay $13.5 million in a class-action lawsuit accusing them of breaching their fiduciary duty to two million past and present Walmart workers. The suit was settled in Kansas City federal court.

Forty-six percent of Americans surveyed by Fidelity Investments cite saving more as their No. 1 financial resolution for 2012, and among this group, the median savings target is $2,400, up from $1,200 last year.

NEW YORK—“Market volatility in recent years has not been unusually large compared to historical norms,” attested Eric Noll, executive vice president, transaction services at NASDAQ.

Lots of attention has been paid this year to the fact that investors are yanking billions after billions out of mutual funds that invest long-term in domestic stocks.

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Congress can’t agree on how to cut the nation’s $1.2 trillion deficit, which is now more than 140% of the nation's gross annual economic output.

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Richard A. Ferri, the founder of Portfolio Solutions, spent much of his first day at the Super Bowl of Indexing here trying to collect names.

Standard & Poor's Indices said it launched a Pan-Arabian stock index.

just-say-grow

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Predictions are easiest to assess, when a year is over.

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- A member of the President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers as the mortgage-led global credit crisis erupted said Monday that the last big weapon in the Federal Reserve Board’s arsenal to create strong growth is to avoid “tinkering around the edges” of the economy and aggressively reset expectations.

Since the financial crisis and Great Recession, 401(k) plans have undergone dramatic shifts. To foster diversification and greater participation, 51% of participants in Fidelity Investments' 401(k) plans are in automatically enrolled plans, up from 16% five years ago, and 73% of the plans use target-date funds as the default, up from 11% in 2006. In the past year, 64% of sponsors changed their investment lineup-up dramatically from 20% in 2008.

The State Street Investor Confidence Index rose two points in November to 97.2. In North America, the index rose 4.7 points to 95.2, and in Europe, it rose 5.4 points to 101.5. In Asia, however, the index fell 4.2 points to 94.6.

Brian C. Rogers of T. Rowe Price is worried about the "irrational quest for safety" (see story, page one) that investors appear to be obsessed with, at the moment.

Putnam Investments announced last week that in 2011, it has expanded its wholesaling staff by 20%, bringing its total external wholesalers to 54 and nearly as many internally. Wholesalers who recently joined Putnam include:

Standard & Poor's famously downgrades its rating of U.S. debt for the first time on Aug. 4. Investors pull out of equities and park their proceeds in ... U.S. Treasury bonds.

The second iteration of the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive is supposed to fix what was wrong with the first version, adopted in 2007.

For financial advisers, the introduction of iPad over the past year has changed everything. Notoriously resistant to new technologies, advisers have become envious of the remarkable advancements taking place in the consumer tech market.

Since the financial crisis and Great Recession, 401(k) plans have undergone dramatic shifts. To foster diversification and greater participation, 51% of participants in Fidelity Investments' 401(k) plans are in automatically enrolled plans, up from 16% five years ago, and 73% of the plans use target-date funds as the default, up from 11% in 2006. In the past year, 64% of sponsors changed their investment lineup-up dramatically from 20% in 2008.

Brian C. Rogers of T. Rowe Price is worried about the "irrational quest for safety" (see story, page one) that investors appear to be obsessed with, at the moment.

Standard & Poor's famously downgrades its rating of U.S. debt for the first time on Aug. 4. Investors pull out of equities and park their proceeds in ... U.S. Treasury bonds.