Investment funds

Two new Standard & Poor’s indexes tracking municipal bonds launched yesterday, paving the way for Vanguard to enter the municipal exchange-traded fund business.

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.

Every time you think you've got a handle on how to manage and benchmark the performance of the funds you invest, markets blow up and you have to start all over again.

Municipal bond mutual funds’ assets climbed to a new record total as they continue to command new money from investors in spite of low yields and a nonstop wave of bad headlines in the mainstream press over state and local government credit.

Target-date funds are more likely to be used by younger retirement plan participants who have lower account balances and have been at their jobs for less time, according to a study released Thursday by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Despite flat second-quarter results, Charles Schwab Corp.’s top executive remained upbeat about the remainder of 2010.

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?

Despite the fact small-cap stocks have tumbled recently as greater economic uncertainty increased, the average domestic small cap mutual fund continues to outperform. So how come some observerrs are skeptical?

Morningstar says that Hartford needs to cut fees more to truly compete.

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.

The hot topic in the media right now is actively managed exchange-traded funds. But given how relatively small the actively-managed ETF universe is compared to the overall ETF universe, this product has received an outsized amount of attention.

Demand for health savings accounts seems to be reviving after a long period of inertia that preceded the passage of health care reform.

Hedge funds finished the volatile first half with modest declines. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index lost 0.81% in June, more than offsetting the gains in the first five months of the year to leave the index down 0.18% for the first half of 2010.

The operational strength of a hedge fund is now just as important to institutional investors as the pedigree and track record of its manager. And fund managers are taking notice

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.

Investors pulled cash out of municipal bond mutual funds last week for just the third time in a year and a half, despite a strong week for state and local government debt.

Just as the alternative energy industry will most likely provide lucrative investment opportunities, so will the overseas markets in the coming years, which is why Fidelity Investments is positioning its 20-year-old environmental energy mutual fund right at the crossroads of those two businesses.

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

Thesis Flexible is an alternative strategy fund that primarily uses hedge fund strategies and is already on the Fidelity and Schwab platforms.

TD Ameritrade and Vanguard Group have added the Thesis Flexible Fund, an alternative strategies fund, to their respective platforms. Grand Distribution Services of Milwaukee distributes the fund, managed by Thesis Fund Mgmt. of New York. The fund uses hedging strategies and is managed by the Thesis team with Stephen Roseman, Thesis Fund Mgmt. chief executive officer, as senior portfolio manager.