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Expert Bond Guru Speaker Leaving Janus Capital

Investors Backlash Against 401(k)s Via Class-Actions

While a few mutual fund companies are trying to appeal to women investors, the majority of companies fall short when equipping advisers with specific women-related resources, according to a recent report, "Women and Investing: Shifting the Traditional Sales Paradigm," by Corporate Insight.

There is positively no shortage of exchange-traded funds to be had these days, and more inventive and narrowly focused products are emerging or in the wings.

Exchange-traded-funds have flourished in the past few years. However, new concerns are bringing to the forefront how the product can confuse investors, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Bigger doesn’t always mean better, but in the case of hedge funds, it might, as large and well-known hedge funds are considering taking cash and business from smaller and newer investors through initial public offerings, according to The Wall Street Journal.

General Motors will be eliminating nearly half of the options in its 401(k) plan but adding other choices later this year, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Fidelity Investments is running three new TV ads that depict people talking about their finances, rather that former Beatle Paul McCartney, The Boston Globe reports.

Edward “Ned” Johnson, chairman of Fidelity Investments, will assume more responsibilities at the firm upon the retirement of Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer Robert Reynolds, the firm announced Thursday. Reynolds, 55, is leaving the firm after 23 years.

Affluent investors are increasingly turning to closed-end funds as diversification tools, Dow Jones reports. Because they close to new investments after an initial public offering, they place a greater amount of their assets in illiquid investments.

Kinetics Asset Management, the company that brought us the first Internet fund, is planning to launch the Water Infrastructure Fund, Dow Jones reports. It will invest in U.S. and foreign companies that supply water infrastructure and related natural-resources businesses.

The original exchange-traded funds, based on broad-based indexes such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, gave investors wide exposure to a multitude of stocks. But as the market has become more crowded, investment advisory firms anxious to jump on the bandwagon have been offering narrower and narrower slices of the market. The newest to come on the scene is single-country ETFs—a bad idea, according to Gary Gordon, a certified financial planner and president of Pacific Park International. Many of these are focused on emerging-markets, perhaps the riskiest of all.

As the markets throughout southeast Asia continue to deliver strong performance—stunning returns averaging 31% a year over the past five years—they are creating more affluent investors and appealing to investment managers around the world, The Financial Times reports. For fund companies that have already extended operations in China and Japan, the region is fertile hunting ground, said Shiv Taneja, the Asia head of Cerulli Associates.

Calling 12b-1 fees a wolf in sheep’s clothing, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist David Nicklaus doubts that the Securities and Exchange Commission will make good on its recent promise to curtail, possibly even eliminate, 12b-1 fees.

Charles Schwab reported that its first-quarter profit rose 12% to $273 million, or 22 cents a share, its eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit gains, the Associated Press reports. The earnings matched the expectations of analysis surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Husbands and wives have vastly different expectations for their retirement years, Fidelity Investments found though a survey of 500 couples born between 1937 and 1964. While they tend to agree on which investments to own, they plan to retire at different ages, have different views about what will be their primary source of income, how long they will remain in the workforce and what kind of lifestyle they will lead.

Two China equity funds raised $2.33 billion on Monday alone, as China’s market continues to soar and the frenzy to invest reached such a furor that the phone systems at a number of banks crashed, Reuters reports. Since the beginning of the year, the benchmark Shanghai index is up three-fold.

The hedge funds that reported returns to Morningstar rose an average of 2.1% in the first quarter, outperforming major indexes, including the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index.

Investors are increasingly bringing dramatically worded lawsuits against 401(k) sponsors and fiduciaries for what they allege are shady fee practices, Mondaq reports. The inspiration for the lawsuits has come primarily by investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Labor and Congress into hidden or excessive fees.

Fidelity Investments’ recent decision to merge two highly specialized single-country funds into regional funds may signal a growing disinterest in niche funds, Dow Jones reports. And fund companies might also be looking to trim operational costs through economies of scale.