Special Program Root Tag

With the deadline to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission less than three months away, consultants and other hedge fund experts are urging fund managers to get ready-and fast.

Asset management firms have never been known for edgy marketing and advertising. Their reputation has always been staid and stoic.

Pioneer Investments Friday announced the launch of two new funds, the Pioneer Absolute Return Credit Fund and the Pioneer Multi-Asset Floating Rate Fund.

A federal judge in Orlando, Fla., has permanently barred Richard Goble, president of a defunct clearing firm and a critic of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, from the securities industry and ordered him to pay a fine of $7,500.

Built-up demand for health savings accounts helped to account for a solid 2010 for J.P. Morgan’s HSA business, according to David Josephs, managing director with the company.“I think there was a lot of standing on the sidelines in 2009 and 2010, waiting to see what happened with healthcare reform,” he says. “When that was cleared up, I think there was some pent-up demand for high-deductible health plans and HSAs, and all of that has that gotten released.”

Worries about the future of Social Security and of Medicare, as well as the experience of the last market crash in 2008-9 and the housing slump, have left an increasing number of Americans worried about whether they will have adequate resources to provide for their retirement years, and are making them more open to financial advice.That’s one finding from the latest annual Survey of Worker Attitudes Towards Retirement Savings Needs conducted by the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI).

BNY Mellon announced Thursday it has agreed to buy Chicago-based Talon Asset Management' s wealth management operations, which have more than $800 million in assets under management.

Fidelity Investments has expanded its marketing consulting program for financial advisers with a new “Business Development and Marketing Planning Toolkit.”

HSBC Global Asset Management has launched two emerging market debt funds. The HSBC Emerging Markets Debt Fund will invest in fixed income issued in emerging markets, and the HSBC Emerging Markets Local Debt Fund will invest in fixed income issued in emerging markets denominated in local currencies.

Horizon Asset Management and Kinetics Asset Management announced Thursday that they will merge on May 1 to form Horizon Kinetics, an investment advisor with $9.8 billion in assets under management.

U.S. Bancorp expects significant long-term growth from its wealth management business over the next three to five years as it looks to reap the benefits from an aggressive four-year strategy to transform the business.

Long-term mutual funds had inflows of $6.52 billion in the week ended April 20, the Investment Company Institute said.

With the effects of the tax filing deadline still fresh in investors’ minds, Charles Schwab is encouraging them to plan ahead for their charitable donations through the end of the year in order to reduce their 2011 taxes.

Wealthy families don’t know how to establish the expectation that heirs build more wealth, SEI concluded after the first of three gatherings in Philadelphia of affluent parents and children this week.

Millionaire investor confidence sunk to its lowest level in seven months in April.According to Spectrem Group, its Millionaire Investor Confidence Index fell nine points in April to minus-one, a neutral reading and the index’s lowest level since September, when the index stood at minus-six. This marks the second-consecutive monthly decline for the index, following an identical nine-point decline in March.

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index increased slightly in April to 65.4, up from 63.8 in March (1985 = 100). The Present Situation Index also increased, to 39.6 from 37.5, and the Expectations Index rose as well, to 82.6 from 81.3.

OppenheimerFunds has launched the Oppenheimer Short Duration Fund, a fund that will seek to take advantage of imbalances in the credit market and provide competitive yield to money market funds and a relative stability of principal.

Wasatch Funds has launched the Wasatch Emerging India Fund, which it says it the first actively managed India mutual fund with a small-cap bias.

Intech has launched the Alpha Capture Index strategy as a passive alternative to capitalization-weighted indexing. Intech says the strategy has the potential to outperform a market-cap-weighted index and is more stable than an equal-weighted portfolio.

Van Eck has launched the Market Vectors Investment Grade Floating Rate ETF, an exchange-traded fund that seeks to track the Market Vectors Investment Grade Floating Rate Index, an index of corporate U.S. dollar-denominated investment grade floating rate notes.