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linkedFA, a social networking site for financial advisors and professionals, has boosted its content offerings thanks to a deal with press release distributor Businesswire.

A trio of finance professors are blasting the big three rating agencies, Moody’s in particular, claiming in a new report that they've unearthed evidence that asset classes that provide the agencies with most of their revenue benefit from better credit ratings while classes that provide less revenue receive harsher treatment.

It was not long ago that the term alternative investments prompted images of exotic venture capital, private equity and hedge fund investment strategies frequented almost exclusively by very wealthy households and institutional investors.

Robert W. Baird & Co. has expanded its wealth management business nationally by hiring a new branch manager and six financial advisors previously handling $920 million in client assets.

The assets held in mutual funds fell $219.2 billion in July -- before the announcement that Standard & Poor’s had cut its rating of U.S. debt for the first time ever.

Despite all the doomsday prognostications, 2011 will likely have fewer muni fund defaults than either 2009 or 2010. So why are advisors and investors still so gun-shy?

A trio of finance professors are blasting the big three rating agencies, Moody’s in particular, claiming in a new report that they've unearthed evidence that asset classes that provide the agencies with most of their revenue benefit from better credit ratings while classes that provide less revenue receive harsher treatment.

The vast majority of retail advisors now use alternative products or strategies for their clients -- but that number is a bit misleading, a new study finds.

Financial advisors looking for new and more effective ways to interact with their Baby Boomer clients -- or find new ones -- should be inspired by a new Pew Research Center report that found social networking participation among this highly coveted group surged more than 60% in the past year.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management has hired James Gearin as chief operating officer of its retirement plan services business, reporting to the unit’s CEO, David Musto.

Invictus Consulting Group has created a bank stress test service for hedge funds that rates the valuation of bank stocks in relation to their peers. It also stress tests banks’ Tier 1 capital reserves two years out. By comparison, banks’ stress tests are handled in house, Invictus noted.

CUNA Mutual Group this week launched a new online retirement guidance platform called RetireOnTarget to help more than 140,000 credit union employees manage their 401(k) accounts and make more informed retirement planning decisions.

401(k) investors and sponsors are likely to stand up and take notice of the fees that will be clearly presented to them in April, particularly the fact that investors pay most of the administration fees. These administration fees, or expense ratios, cover not just fund management but also recordkeeping, auditing and broker commissions.

Ascent Investment Partners, a fixed-income investment management firm, this week appointed Brian Tournier as its new director of research where he’ll oversee the firm’s credit research and monitoring endeavors and review existing and prospective investments.

The so-called “Godfather of Soul” passed away on Christmas Day 2006, and generously left his $100 million fortune to a special trust set up to help poor and needy children. Yet, four-and-a-half years later, not one child has seen a cent. Why?

Despite their reputation for taking advantage of upsets in the markets, hedge funds wisely ran for the exit from stocks between 2007 and 2009, according to a report by Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business Assistant Professor of Business Itzhak Ben-David. Ben-David conducted the study along with Rabih Moussawi of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Francesco Franzoni of the Swiss Finance Institute and the University of Lugano.

Investors have developed a serious aversion to U.S. equity mutual funds, which is upsetting the balance of fund flows, according to Morningstar.

The correlation between stocks and the S&P 500 has reached a 20-year high of 0.73, up from 0.44 in July—posing a real challenge for individual fund managers, according to Goldman Sachs.

Both the Conference Board and the State Street confidence indexes plummeted in August, with the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index falling 14.7 points from July, to a reading of 44.5, and the State Street Investor Confidence Index declining by 12.9 points, to 89.6.

BlackRock has filed to create proprietary indexes for its iShares exchange-traded funds. The indexes will be "transparent to the public," the exemptive order says, indicating the indexes could be for actively managed ETFs.