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New Fidelity Ads Tell Investors to 'Turn Here'

Memani Leads Fixed Income at Oppenheimer

After graduating from Boston College in 1971, John V. Murphy began his career at Arthur Andersen & Co.

It's counterintuitive-wealth managers are ratcheting up the price and providing lower returns on variable annuities. Some providers have doubled prices in the past six months, and more changes are expected.

Mutual funds have been able to thrive for the past 85 years thanks to their ability to adapt to changing markets and help investors stay diversified during good times and bad.

Investors seeking safety and stability have recently been moving massive amounts of their assets into money market mutual funds, causing the funds to swell to nearly $4 trillion and making them the single largest mutual fund asset class, according to the Investment Company Institute.

State Street Corp. has introduced a new automated service to help fund companies lower their operating costs. Linked to the firm’s global accounting and fund administration systems, it automates manual or partially automated accounting processes in the back office.

Financial advisers proved their worth in the second half of 2008, with their clients' average returns 16 percentage points higher than the S&P 500, Fidelity found in a survey of 300 investors and 200 advisers.

Fifteen percent, or 778 hedge funds, closed in the final quarter of 2008, directly due to the financial markets meltdown, according to Hedge Fund Research. That topped the previous record for quarterly closings, which occurred in the third quarter of 2008 when 344 hedge funds shut down.

IndexIQ has submitted filings to roll out five exchange-traded funds, each of which will track indexes created by IndexIQ subsidiary Financial Development HoldCo LLC.

The Investment Company Institute’s money fund working group has recommended a series of measures to make money funds more stable, less prone to massive redemptions all at once and more transparent—all in an effort to help the funds maintain investors’ faith and their $1 NAV.

American Funds will lay off an additional 500 people this year, on top of the 500 who lost their jobs in January. That will leave the 80-year-old firm with a workforce of about 8,500.

Instead of praising investors for making the “Smart Move” by moving to Fidelity, the firm’s new advertising campaign calls them into action by urging them to “Turn Here.”

Long live the 401(k) match. Seventy-four percent of plan sponsors who had a 401(k) match in place are still honoring that promise, according to the American Benefits Council. And 15% have either increased the match or are considering doing so.

Samuel Israel, Bayou Group

Citi has created the first web-based platform to handle all of the various types of investment products inclued in a unified managed household account, with TIAA-CREF coming on board the first asset manager to sign on. TIAA-CREF will be using the platform, OpenWealth, in its fee-based wealth management division.

Eighty-three percent of investors between the ages of 55 and 70 who are working with a fee-based adviser believe it’s more important for them to generate guaranteed income for retirees than to deliver above-average returns, Fidelity found.

OppenheimerFunds has launched a new educational campaign, including personalized communications, to allay 401(k) investors’, plan sponsors’ and financial advisers’ concerns about market volatility. Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab, likewise, are conducting seminars and ad campaigns to walk investors through the merits of sticking with the markets and revisiting risk tolerance.

Janus is merging its mutual fund units catering to advisor-sold and retail direct, a move many see as wise as more investors turn to advice-driven channels.