Special Program Root Tag

Determined to carve out its stake in the coming Baby Boomer retirement rush hour, Fidelity Investments of Boston has just unveiled a pair of brand new retirement income solutions designed to work together or separately. The products-a family of income-producing mutual funds-of-funds and a variable annuity guaranteeing income-were two years in the making, Fidelity officials said.

Amid research that mutual funds with good Morningstar stewardship grades tend to outperform funds with poor Stewardship grades, Morningstar has toughened those grades. Morningstar has just released new stewardship grades for more than 1,000 funds and plans to add to the coverage in the ensuing months.

Speaking at a hedge fund conference in Greenwich, Conn., Securities and Exchange Commission regulators indicated that they are conducting 30 investigations into hedge fund trading in the Northeast alone, Reuters reports.

John Sabelhaus, an expert on retirement, modeling, savings behavior, pensions and Social Security, has joined the Investment Company Institute as senior economist. He will play a key role in ICI’s investor research program, in which the ICI conducts multiple surveys each year to understand about equity and mutual fund ownership, saving for college and retiree behavior.

Bennett Freeman, senior vice president of social research and policy at Calvert Group, testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs this week on the firm’s support of divestment of holdings of companies that support the Sudanese government, which has been conducting genocide over the past two years.

Bank of America has introduced a unified managed account program designed for its wealthy and ultra-wealthy clients.

Capital Group, parent company of the American Funds, is entering the Japanese market this month with the launch of two mutual funds that it will sell through Japan’s largest broker, Nomura Holdings, Reuters reports. One fund is a global equity fund and the second is a global equity and bond fund.

F-squared Investments has launched 18 indexes of best-of-breed actively managed mutual funds, called ActiFindexes, through a new platformcalled Active Index Solutions (AIS).

“It’s an absolute fact that fee disclosure is going to happen,” Rick Meigs, president of 401khelpcenter.com, told MarketWatch. “The battle now comes down to what form it takes.”

The reality that Baby Boomers are beginning to retire is setting in at mutual fund companies, prompting many to turn their attention to younger generations, The Boston Globe reports.

Investors cashed out of real estate investment trusts earlier this year, but with their fundamentals showing strength and the effects of the Federal Reserve’s latest half-point cut, flows out of REITs are slowing down, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Canadian regulators have given a new name to the “prospectus profile,” an idea that has been knocked around in the U.S. over the past eight years.

Fidelity Investments on Wednesday launched a suite of retirement income products and tools aimed at individual investors and advisers. The suite includes a new family of 11 retirement income mutual funds-of-funds spanning from 2016 to 2036 and a low-cost, deferred variable annuity with an income guarantee.

Fund companies continue to exhibit abysmal voting records on proxies supported by shareholders, Reuters reports, citing a report from FundVotes.com analyzing proxy voting records at 54 fund groups. Most continue to overwhelmingly side with management.

Fueled by a 45% rise in China’s Shanghai composite stock index and a 25% surge in the Hong Kong Hang Seng, Asia Pacific ex-Japan mutual funds led the charge in the third quarter, with average gains of 7.3%, Morningstar Canada reported.

In recent weeks, advertisements for exchange-traded funds have begun re-appearing in places they have not been since the last freewheeling days of the bull market of the late 1990s: during college football games on TV, in personal finance magazines and even in New York City subway cars.

Although it has a longstanding reputation of protecting the interests of the nation’s senior citizens, AARP is no different from any other profit-seeking organization, maintains Baltimore financial planner Andrew Tignanelli, the Los Angeles Times reports.

After all of the lawsuits and the $2.7 billion in fines, apparently some investors haven’t learned their lesson about market timing mutual funds.

Fidelity Investments paid $660,000 to lobby Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of the Treasury in the first half of the year, the Associated Press reports.

Peter Clarke, chief executive officer of the Man Group, told Reuters that if asset flows to his company are any indication of the outlook for the hedge fund industry, investors will continue to pour assets into hedge funds.