Investment products

Keating Capital, a pre-IPO fund, concluded its public offering, raising $86.8 million. Next, the fund plans to list its stock on Nasdaq by the end of the year.

Companies that pay dividends, and in many cases are raising them, are attracting strong attention amid an otherwise unappetizing market. But a healthy dividend doesn’t necessarily mean the company issuing it is in the best shape, says Standard & Poor’s equity analyst Todd Rosenbluth.

American Century has launched the American Century Global Real Estate Fund, managed by Steven Brown. He will be supported by analysts Steven Rodriguez and Vishal Govil.

With markets reacting negatively to concerns about a weakening U.S. economy, investors might do well to look at the consumer staples sector, according to Standard & Poor's equity analyst Thomas Graves in a new report released Tuesday.

Huntington Funds this week announced the debut of its Huntington Disciplined Equity Fund which purports to offer investors a fund that delivers solid, stable annual returns with lower volatility than mutual funds.

OppenheimerFunds is paying $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit against two of its funds, the Oppenheimer Champion and the Oppenheimer Core Bond funds.

Advisors will be increasingly called upon to create endowment-like portfolios and will need to combine several routine techniques.

Unit investment trusts have their pros and cons but lately investors have been seeing a decided upside in a dividend strategy portfolio.

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.

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.

With about 25% of U.S. company results posted for the second quarter, most have exceeded estimates and have improved sales. Industrial production and consumption are also rebounding, leading BlackRock's Bob Doll to project stronger economic growth in the second half of 2011.

Vanguard Group is extending its Admiral low-cost shares to six additional domestic equity index funds, effective September. The new fees will range from 10 basis points to 21 basis points.

Nationwide Funds Group has launched the Nationwide Alternatives Allocation Fund, a passively managed mutual fund that will invest in seven alternative asset classes: global real estate, emerging market debt, emerging market stocks, commodities, TIPS, international bonds and high-yield bonds.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has a message for investors considering lesser-understood investments as an alternative to traditional fixed-income and equity investments: caveat emptor.

Faithshares is getting out of the Christian values exchange-traded fund business, confirming this week it will shutter its last remaining religious values-based ETF, the Christian Values Fund ETF (FOC), sometime next month.

Franklin Templeton Investments has launched the Templeton Frontier Markets Fund in Canada, which will invest at least 80% of its portfolio in 61 countries in the very early stages of development, such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Romania, Jordan, Tunisia, Columbia, Zambia, Paraguay and Kenya. International investing expert Mark Mobius will run the fund.

SunAmerica Asset Management has launched the SunAmerica Global Trends Fund, a fund sub-advised by Wellington Management and that combines 10 global asset classes with a rules-based asset allocation strategy that seeks to move in and out of changing markets.

Even if the politicians in Washington do manage to raise the debt ceiling, all the red ink and all the money printed by the Federal Reserve to prop up the economy over the past three years make it likely, according to some experts, that inflation could be on the rise and that reality has many investors understandably unnerved.

The 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are expected to increase their annual dividend payout by 12.66% from a year ago and 2.93% from the first quarter, according to a survey by Dow Jones Indexes.

A flood of new exchange-traded funds are enticing many investors to move out of mutual funds and into these chic funds despite their relatively scant -- if not nonexistent -- track records. But one S&P analyst said that shouldn't stop investors from hoping on the ETF bandwagon.