International funds

Fund managers may soon be faced to make a tough choice if they want to reduce operating risk and cost.

Establishing a presence in China is slow going, but Northern Trust Corp., which recently won approval for a Beijing branch office, believes the payoff will be worth the wait.

Morgan Stanley announced Monday it has named Paul Price head of the firm’s investment management international sales.

Buy-side firms and other market players want to expand the scope of transaction reporting to comply with European legislation on best execution to over-the-counter derivatives and introduce position reporting for OTC derivatives as well.

The operator of a pan-European data network has deployed high-speed optical networking gear, to achieve trip times of 4.22 thousandths of a second between London and Frankfurt and 2.65 milliseconds between Paris and Brussels.

International asset management firms are taking their recent uptick with a grain of salt as they anticipate a continued climb from the financial pitfalls of 2008, a new study claims.

Fidelity International portfolio manager Anthony Bolton continues to believe in China - in both good times and bad. The manager of the closed-end Fidelity China Special Situations Fund, who came out of less than two years in retirement at the end of 2009 to pick up the China baton once again, addresses the world economy and China's role in that in today's Wall Street Journal.

Has Citigroup Inc. finally found a strategy to hang its hat on - and is globalization, once again, the key to growth for the largest U.S. asset management firms?

The Morningstar 2010 Investment Conference in Chicago was chock-full of sessions on international investing, and the hallways were abuzz with talk of emerging markets. Yet some fund managers damped the excitement, saying that although emerging markets are hot, these investments will not be able to live up to expectations.

Prompted by a shift toward defined contribution plans and regulatory changes, European fund managers and their asset servicing providers will increase their spending on portfolio management and accounting systems to $787 million by 2012, from about $646 million in 2009, according to a report released by Aite Group.

NYSE Technologies and Markit Group said Thursday they will consolidate their pools of data on trading in over-the-counter stocks in Europe.

Investor confidence has declined, but concerns over the European economy appear to be easing, a monthly Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey of fund managers found.

An “empowered investor base” demanding greater transparency and liquidity from managers, while also zeroing in on absolute returns and uncorrelated investment strategies, has led to a significant demand for alternative mutual funds in the U.S. and Europe, a new whitepaper finds.

Payden & Rygel announced Wednesday with a WSJ tombstone advertisement that it has opened its first office on the East Coast, selecting Boston’s Financial District.

With the SEC money market fund rules taking effect this Friday and the Libor up sharply, fund managers are reportedly beginning to see lending to European banks as too much of a risk. The bigger worry is this pullback has the potential to lead to another credit crunch like the one that nearly crippled the capital markets in 2008.

BOSTON -- The staggering growth of UCITS (Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities) throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America has led to a proliferation of new investment products and trading opportunities, but restrictive investment mandates and tax requirements in the U.S. are causing some U.S. investors to feel left out of the game.

If nothing else, the last two years have taught affluent investors and financial professionals that change is often unexpected, swift and brutal. But despite taking severe double-digit losses on their portfolios, affluent investors surveyed recently by HSBC still largely have the same portfolio allocations they did at the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

Hedge funds’ take on the wide array of new regulations being proposed for collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and derivatives, in addition to taxes on risk retention, is simple: Bring it on.

In an effort to develop its wealth management arm, Toronto insurance giant Sun Life Financial Inc. announced Thursday it is established a proprietary mutual fund company in Canada.

Predicting a positive but shaky year ahead, alternative investors are looking abroad to reap the benefits of the global recovery.