Investments

Fixed annuities sales were steady at $1.1 billion, whereas variable annuities gained $100 million from a month earlier ending November at $1.5 billion, according to data from Kehrer-LIMRA.

Strong sales over the past year prove that Americans are looking for guaranteed income.

NEW YORK-The U.S. economy will muddle through even as domestic stocks rake in double-digit percentage returns for the third straight year, said Robert C. Doll, the chief equity strategist for fundamental equities at BlackRock, in a breakfast briefing in New York Tuesday.

Equity funds delivered 16.57% in 2010, with more than one-third of the gains, 6.43%, coming in during the last five weeks of the year, Lipper said.

The mutual fund industry typically focuses on weekly and monthly fund flow figures.

Investors kept pulling their cash from municipal bond mutual funds at a record pace last week as frightened money continued to flee the market.

Genworth discontinues retail and group variable annuities, while Western & Southern and Allianz put faith in new variable annuities.

Managing risk with be the trend in the investment management business in 2011, said Ed Keon, managing director and portfolio manager for Prudential Financial's Quantitative Management Associates, at Prudential’s 2011 Global Economic and Retirement Outlook briefing in New York on Tuesday.

These are the firm’s first funds to concentrate individually on these areas.

Fund complexes will invest in their IT infrastructure, Confuence predicts.

NYSE Euronext said average daily volume in dervivatives contracts were down 6.2% worldwide in December 2010, compared to the prior year.

A new survey concludes that nearly half of boomers have no financial plans in place in case they live longer than expected.

Janus on Thursday announced the launch of the Janus Global Bond Fund and the Janus Emerging Markets Fund. They are the firm’s first standalone strategies in the global credit and emerging market equity categories.

Don Schreiber Jr., the chief executive officer and founder of WBI, said the funds’ strategies previously were only available to high-net-worth investors through separately managed accounts.

No sooner did Build America Bonds become orphaned than they caught fire.

By comparison, the S&P 500 rose 15.06%.

Vanguard, BlackRock, Schwab and State Street are deadlocked in a fierce price competition.

Morningstar honors Bob Goldfarb and David Poppe.

Since August, the funding status for the typical U.S. corporate pension plan has posted a more than 13 percentage point improvement, marking the largest four-month positive swing for the BNY Mellon Pension Summary Report since it was created in 2006.

Assets held in exchange-traded funds reached $994.5 billion by the end of 2010, according to data compiled by the National Stock Exchange. That is up 27.1%, compared to a year earlier