Special Program Root Tag

Many young adults between the ages of 25 and 34 have unrealistic expectations about retirement, according to a report from Edward Jones, purposely released on Wednesday to coincide with National Save for Retirement Week.

Participants in 401(k) plans over the past 10 years have continued to make the same mistakes, John Hancock found in a recent analysis of returns between 1997 and 2006.

SPA ETF, a provider of indexes and exchange-traded funds in the U.K. began trading six ETFs based on six proprietary indexes on the American Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

Many hedge fund investors in the U.K. are dissatisfied with weak returns over the summer, and are cashing out, the Financial Times reports.

Due to the decline in buy side’s reliance on sell-side investment research and money managers’ increasing interest in automating and aggregating research, the buy side will increase its expected $586 million on research technology this year by 22% a year to $1.1 billion by 2010.

As ProShares prepares to launch a series of international index exchange-traded funds, the company’s CEO, Michael Sapir, spoke with Investor’s Business Daily about the future of the industry, and surprisingly, scoffed at many of the recent trends in the ETF industry.

China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index soared above 6,000 for the first time this week, renewing fears that the market, which has increased six times in value in the past two years alone, is about to crash, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Although some of the biggest fund families including Fidelity, Vanguard and American Funds, don’t require their fund managers to have their own money invested in the funds they run, many other fund companies are now requiring their managers to do so, according to the Dow Jones News Service.

Senior citizens advocacy group AARP is launching a national campaign to meet face-to-face with business leaders, civic groups and companies to convince more employers to automatically enroll their workers in 401(k) plans, the Associated Press reports.

In a poll of 100 hedge funds and hedge funds-of-funds with $900 billion in assets under management, Ernst & Young found that 80% expect incentive fees to go down within two years, and 72% expect management fees to decrease, Dow Jones reports.

William Blair & Co. has introduced the William Blair Global Growth Fund, which George Greig, head of the firm’s international team for the past 11 years, will manage.

Fidelity and Vanguard recently introduced retirement income funds, and while they both offer monthly payments that can vary from year to year, they are actually very different from one another, The Wall Street Journal reports.

American Funds’ Growth Fund of America has become the first mutual fund to ever top $200 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports, but now that it’s reached that gargantuan size and its performance has become average, some shareholders are pressuring it to close to new investors. Certainly, this month, Morningstar took away one of its stars, ranking it now as four-star.

Fidelity Investments’ director of advertising Claire Huang will be leaving the company before the end of the year, the Boston Globe reports. This development, combined with the recent appointment of Sanjiv Mirchandani as executive of product marketing, indicates that Fidelity is taking a new marketing and advertising approach.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued New York hedge fund Colonial Investment Management in federal court Monday, charging the company with making more than $1.48 million from illegal trades, the Associated Press reports.

With a backlog of mutual fund and hedge fund cases at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the departure of two Democratic commissioners and Chairman Christopher Cox’s unusual vote in favor of two contradictory proposals on shareholders’ rights to nominate board trustees, the future of the SEC is in question, the Los Angeles Times reports.

It isn't often that mutual fund firms launch remarkable, truly unique new products. Certainly, exchange-traded, lifecycle, 130/30 and emerging-market funds have been among the most significant and popular offerings in recent years.

Although Fidelity Investments’ mutual funds have been delivering solid returns, many investors have been taking billions of dollars worth of business elsewhere, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Nasdaq has introduced a new index of 50 companies, called the the Nasdaq Q-50 Index, that it is considering including in the Nasdaq 100 Index.

While the closing of the hedge fund at Dillon Read was due to the difficulty in valuing subprime mortgage-backed holdings, the problem of fair valuation is permeating a wide number of other hedge funds and mutual funds, The Wall Street Journal reports.