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Putnam Investments has unveiled a redesigned website that provides advisors with advanced portfolio modeling capabilities, practice-management resources and a social media component for sharing and surveying information on Twitter and Facebook.

The recent spate of bad news for four major banks could eventually yield a new crop of breakaway brokers, according to an attorney who specializes in helping wirehouse advisors go the independent route.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch wealth management executive John Thiel's new plan to restructure the firm’s U.S. wealth management business should help the firm better serve and acquire high net worth and instituional clients.

Financial advisors and clients who may have been curious about exchange-traded fund managed portfolios but have been deterred by the lack of any objective rating or way to compare the performances of hundreds of these funds will soon have those tools at their disposal.

Individual investors are buying exchange-traded funds at a fast pace, even though many don’t fully understand them, according to a survey from Charles Schwab.

Fidelity Charitable has created an array of seven investment options offering diversification across asset classes and risk. In addition, Fidelity Charitable has created an online tool to help investors make investment decisions.

Credit Suisse has launched the Credit Suisse Global Equity Market Neutral ETN, its fifth alternative exchange-traded note.

The latest entrant into the wealth management arena comes not from Wall Street but from just outside Silicon Valley, and is taking dead aim at the Internet brokerage space for higher-end investors with a slick Web-based dashboard, holistic account monitoring and a stable of financial advisors to complement the technology with a human touch.

Employees who are automatically enrolled in target-date funds when they are signed up for a 401(k) plan are very likely to stick with the target date investment strategy for the long haul, according to a study conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).

Putnam Investments has developed a new website for financial advisers featuring sophisticated, open-architecture portfolio modeling tools (www.putnam.com/advisor). The site builds upon a series of practice management recommendations, links to Putnam’s social media sites, articles and videos of the company’s investment professionals discussing their investment outlook and the firm’s analytical tool FundVisualizer, which can model a portfolio from a universe of more than 11,000 mutual funds and ETFs.

Morningstar will begin ranking and researching managed ETF portfolios by the end of the year, the research firm announced at its second annual ETF Invest Conference in Chicago Thursday.

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index rose 0.3% in August, following a 0.6% gain in July and a 0.3% increase in June.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Japan was on a roll. They had one of the highest economic growth rates in the world. Their manufacturing prowess grew to be the envy of the world. Their stock market soared 373 percent between 1980 and its peak in 1989. And, like China today, there were predictions that Japan would overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world. But, as The Prosperous Advisor Steve Sanduski points out, times sure have changed.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch wealth management executive John Thiel unveiled a new plan that restructures the firm’s U.S. wealth management business in a memo to employees on Wednesday.

Guggenheim Partners and Rydex/SGI announced that Guggenheim will acquire Rydex in the first quarter of 2012 and combine its asset management capabilities under the name Guggenheim Investments. Once the deal is closed, Guggenheim Investments will have $119 billion of assets under management. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Long-Term funds netted $2.13 billion in the week ended Sept. 14, according to the Investment Company Institute.

The Federal Reserve Board said it will sell $400 billion in short-term Treasuries for longer-term holdings by 2012 as its latest effort to kick start the economy.

When financial advisor Jeff Leventhal left UBS Financial Services for HighTower Advisors earlier this month, the decision was as much about serving his clients as the direction in which he saw the entire wealth industry headed.

Fidelity Investments racked up defined contribution commitments in the first half of the year totaling 315,000 participants, 269 plans and $17 billion in assets under administration, the company says.

While the recent FPA Convention provided some new and very interesting presentations and introduced some pretty high-brow concepts, Financial Planning columnist Bob Veres felt far too many of the presentations were bogged down by speakers who decided -- or were compelled -- to “dumb down” the material to appeal to the lowest common denominator. What did you think?