Subject Root Tag

The average financial adviser works closely with 14 fund companies and receives more than 100 e-mails, letters, wholesaler visits and internal sales desk calls a month from them, according to Cogent Research’s “Adviser Touchpoints 2009” report.

Fidelity Investments is offering new resources to help investors and advisers decide if converting a regular IRA to a Roth IRA makes financial sense, adding a conversion evaluator calculator to its website that takes 20 minutes or less to use: fidelity.com/rothevaluator. Fidelity also has tax professionals available by phone and at its 132 investor branches across the nation, and has just published a “Viewpoint” article on the importance of tax diversification on its website: fidelity.com/taxdiversification.

For money market fund advisors and investors, help on yields is seen on the way.

The House Financial Services Committee passed a bill Wednesday that would allow states to oversee hedge funds and other investment advisors with $100 million or less in assets under management, leaving larger investment managers up to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Plan sponsors are becoming more aggressive about helping their workers save for retirement, and even investment advice is now offered, Hewitt Associates found in a survey of 300 mid- and large-sized companies.

Value Line, its CEO and former CCO settled civil charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $45 million for having improperly funneled mutual fund trades to its affiliated broker/dealer and pocketing $24 million in commissions.

Of the wirehouse advisers who switched firms, 34% moved to another wirehouse, while 18% went independent. Another 11% of those wirehouse advisers went to a regional firm.

Putnam Chief Executive Officer Robert Reynolds is once again sounding the call for a new approach to 401(k) investing, inclusive of annuities and other retirement income products. This time, he is asking Washington to create a national insurance charter that will ensure consistent regulation for assured income products.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has hired Norm Champ, general counsel to hedge fund Chilton Investment Co., to head up its New York examinations group.

UBS Wealth Management Americas continued to hemorrhage new client assets in the third quarter at almost twice the clip from the previous quarter. Advisers also continued to walk out the door to the point that the company may not be able gain market share from competitors.

With all of the news about low 401(k) balances and half of the people in the country not being offered either a 401(k) or a pension plan, amazingly, an estimated 10% may be saving too much for retirement. That’s according to the estimates of Harvard University economist David Laibson.

Since the market’s low on March 9, small-cap value stocks have delivered some of the best performance, but experts believe the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of large-cap growth stocks, The Wall Street Journal reports.

MassMutual Retirement Services, a unit of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., announced that September was its best sales month ever.

Mutual fund investors are not alone in how the financial crisis has profoundly changed the way they approach saving, risk management and asset allocation. Without question, investors are more conservative and interested in flexible products that minimize risk and use alternative investments during heightened market volatility or a prolonged downturn as we saw in 2008.

McCann Takes Over as Chief of UBS Wealth

Senate Examines Risks Of Target-Date Funds

Some say that character is revealed by what you do when no one is looking. This may be true for an individual, but for leaders within organizations, I contend that perhaps character is revealed by what you do when everyone is looking. When the heat is on. When challenges abound. When resources are scarce, competition is fierce, and failure is a possibility.

Bank of America wants to remind everyone that Merrill Lynch is more than just a sideshow. Trying to move beyond the lawsuits and congressional hearings, BoA will finally start using Merrill for what it intended when it bought the beleaguered investment bank in January: to develop wealth management products.

NEW YORK - After the terrible performance of markets last year, disgruntled investors of all sizes are considering switching financial advisers to someone else, even if their own adviser buffered their portfolio so that it lost less than the market's overall 38% decline.

NEW YORK - Selling retirement income guarantees after a recession is like selling flood insurance after a flood. Timing is everything, and currently the timing could not be better.