Investments

Yields on money market funds have eroded since 2007, but the worst days may be over.

The precious metal plays the role of insurance: There when you need it and quiet when you don't.

A bad day for financial engineers in Chicago continued Wednesday, when the Securities and Exchange Commission said the assets of a quantitative trading firm were frozen.

Over the next five business days through Sept. 6, the Dow Jones Golden Crossover Large-Cap Total Stock Market Index will decrease its equity allocation from 100% to 25%, moving that 75% allocation into the cash equivalent of short-term U.S. Treasury bills.

Fears of another recession could prompt corporate Treasurers and lenders to withhold financing, which in and of itself could raise the probability of less liquidity and further economic weakening.

BNY Mellon Asset Management tapped Christopher Sheldon as its new chief investment officer of The Dreyfus Corporation, the New York-based asset management and distribution firm overseeing more than $400 billion in mutual funds and separately managed accounts.

A closely watched index established by Dow Jones Indexes back in November 2010 began flashing red on Tuesday, a development that now has investors and their advisors reviewing the back-tested index’s history for signs of what’s to come and what investment strategies they should pursue next.

A trio of finance professors are blasting the big three rating agencies, Moody’s in particular, claiming in a new report that they've unearthed evidence that asset classes that provide the agencies with most of their revenue benefit from better credit ratings while classes that provide less revenue receive harsher treatment.

It was not long ago that the term alternative investments prompted images of exotic venture capital, private equity and hedge fund investment strategies frequented almost exclusively by very wealthy households and institutional investors.

The assets held in mutual funds fell $219.2 billion in July -- before the announcement that Standard & Poor’s had cut its rating of U.S. debt for the first time ever.

Despite all the doomsday prognostications, 2011 will likely have fewer muni fund defaults than either 2009 or 2010. So why are advisors and investors still so gun-shy?

A trio of finance professors are blasting the big three rating agencies, Moody’s in particular, claiming in a new report that they've unearthed evidence that asset classes that provide the agencies with most of their revenue benefit from better credit ratings while classes that provide less revenue receive harsher treatment.

The vast majority of retail advisors now use alternative products or strategies for their clients -- but that number is a bit misleading, a new study finds.

Invictus Consulting Group has created a bank stress test service for hedge funds that rates the valuation of bank stocks in relation to their peers. It also stress tests banks’ Tier 1 capital reserves two years out. By comparison, banks’ stress tests are handled in house, Invictus noted.

Ascent Investment Partners, a fixed-income investment management firm, this week appointed Brian Tournier as its new director of research where he’ll oversee the firm’s credit research and monitoring endeavors and review existing and prospective investments.

Despite their reputation for taking advantage of upsets in the markets, hedge funds wisely ran for the exit from stocks between 2007 and 2009, according to a report by Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business Assistant Professor of Business Itzhak Ben-David. Ben-David conducted the study along with Rabih Moussawi of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Francesco Franzoni of the Swiss Finance Institute and the University of Lugano.

Investors have developed a serious aversion to U.S. equity mutual funds, which is upsetting the balance of fund flows, according to Morningstar.

The correlation between stocks and the S&P 500 has reached a 20-year high of 0.73, up from 0.44 in July—posing a real challenge for individual fund managers, according to Goldman Sachs.

Both the Conference Board and the State Street confidence indexes plummeted in August, with the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index falling 14.7 points from July, to a reading of 44.5, and the State Street Investor Confidence Index declining by 12.9 points, to 89.6.

BlackRock has filed to create proprietary indexes for its iShares exchange-traded funds. The indexes will be "transparent to the public," the exemptive order says, indicating the indexes could be for actively managed ETFs.