Investment funds

In their recent shift toward retail deposits, one factor that has helped banks is weak competition from money market funds.

PHOENIX -- The mutual fund industry has been wracking its brains to come up with a suitable solution that provides investors with a guaranteed income component in retirement, but has so far failed to achieve this goal.

48% Saving Less for Retirement

The Securities and Exchange Commission is promising to take another look at revising or eliminating 12b-1 fees this year, now that the financial crisis seems to be abating.

NEW YORK—Following one the worst global financial meltdowns, the economic recovery has exceeded almost anyone’s expectations and will get another jolt when employment numbers begin to improve in the next couple of months, according to Barclays Capital.

Money market mutual funds could continue to pay low yields, even after a future rise in interest rates turns their income around.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is promising to take another look at revising or eliminating 12b-1 fees this year, now that the financial crisis seems to be abating.

Financial planners, watch your backs. Financial Engines, a retirement plan advisor co-founded by a Nobel Prize winner, completed an initial public offering Monday that blew the doors off the IPO market and affirmed investor belief in a business model that offers low-cost sophisticated retirement advice to individual investors.

American investors remain confused about this economic recovery, according to monthly data from Morningstar.

The Investment Company Institute is on board with many government reforms intended to make money market funds more secure, but not all of them.

SEI is offering enhanced, online portfolio and account monitoring services for wealth managers, to help them deal with increasing regulations concerning account reviews.

The unwinding of the Federal Reserve's liquidity programs is unlikely to boost the sickly yields on tax-free money market funds, participants say.

U.S. households increasingly are making retirement investment decisions on their own, often placing nest-egg balances in different types of accounts at multiple institutions. And a huge chunk of that money has gone into everyday banking products.

Redemption fees successfully protect mutual funds from short-term traders, whose churning can serious hurt fund performance, according to “Redemption Fees: Reward for Punishment,” authored by three researchers at Texas Tech University’s Division of Personal Financial Planning.

But the organization remains strongly opposed to doing away with a steady net asset value, which is usually $1.00 per share, and is a fundamental feature of money market funds.

T. Rowe Price is looking to buy a stake worth $1 billion or more. T. Rowe Price, China asset management, James A.C. Kennedy

T. Rowe Price is looking to buy a stake worth $1 billion or more in China Asset Management, according to reports.

The American investor is just as confused about this economic recovery as advisors are, according to data from Morningstar.

After one 2030 target-date fund lost 41% in 2008, legislators in Washington went up in arms against the fund category. One of the most controversial proposals would have limited equity exposure in such funds, but the industry fought back on the grounds the 40 Act gives asset managers leeway to determine asset allocation on their own.

MetLife believes that the once-ignored “emerging investor” is becoming critical to adviser business as firms try to figure out how to retain and recruit new clients.