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Herb Allison, the former president of Merrill Lynch, was relaxing on a beach in the Virgin Islands in September 2008 when he got an urgent phone call from a senior aide to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Effective July 21, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that any new investment advisor who is managing more than $25 million and less than $100 million will have to join smaller investment advisors in registering with the state regulatory authority where she or he is based. The only exceptions are New York and Wyoming where, because those states don’t require any examination of investment advisors, all investment advisors would still have to register with and be regulated by the SEC.

U.S. ETFs are on a roll so far in 2011, according to State Street Global Advisors, which released its 2011 mid-year ETF outlook report on Thursday.

A Fidelity Investments survey released on Thursday found that a majority of Americans do not understand how their pensions work.

National Planning Holdings, Inc., one of the nation’s larger independent broker-dealer networks, announced this week it has contracted with business technology firm Erado to supply its more than 3,500 affiliated representatives with compliance services for social media applications.

A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel has ordered Merrill Lynch to pay $8.1 million in compensatory damages to a family corporation that claimed the firm had breached its fiduciary duty with its investments.

MassMutual has made a number of enhancements to its RetireSMART target-date and lifecycle funds, most notably adding mutual fund options to its target-date series. Previously, only separately managed accounts through a group annuity contract were offered as target-date funds.

UBS Wealth Management Americas has hired two financial advisors from Oppenheimer & Co. to its Boca Raton, Fla. office.

Lately, I've seen more and better thinking about asset management than you could find in the previous 20 years in the profession and I think it may be time to give modern portfolio theory a makeover. In fact, I think this fits a long-standing historical pattern.

Federated Investors has absorbed $100.6 million in assets from the Tributary International Equity Fund and merged them into the Federated International Leaders Fund, a fund will a similar mandate and that invests in high-quality foreign companies that appear to be undervalued.

Need a reason for optimism about the U.S. economy? The Hartford’s chief investment strategist for wealth management has six.

Americas Trading Group said it selected NYSE Technologies to provide the backbone for its high-performance execution platform.

PNC's Atlanta branch deal underscores how wary acquisition-hungry banks are as they bulk up in a slow and risky market.

The finalization of new debit card regulations will likely provide a tailwind to bank technology spending later this year, according to the top executive of vendor Fiserv Inc. The company expects its clients will funnel more money toward software purchases as a result of rules, known collectively as the Durbin amendment, which the Federal Reserve Board shored up last month.

In what may be a sign of a tightening of regulation of social media use by investment advisors, the Securities Division of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office is issuing new guidelines and best practices standards that will go into effect next year.

Richard Frick joined Morgan Stanley Smith Barney as Philadelphia complex manager last week replacing Frank LaRosa, who was terminated in May.

First Republic Bank this week named Dale Smith as the new managing director of the private bank and wealth management firm's San Diego office.

Securities America, the nation's seventh-largest independent broker-dealer according to Financial Planning's 2011 revenue rankings, continues to lose reps at rapid clip as they and the rest of the industry await the unit's eventual sale.

There are two gigantic economic crises weighing heavily on the minds of investors and government leaders right now: the raising of the debt ceiling and the risk to the country’s venerable AAA sovereign debt rating.

As Europe stemmed fears of contagion from Greece’s default by arranging voluntary rollovers of private bonds and the United States hammers out a deal over its debt ceiling, stocks tentatively moved up in Tuesday trading.