Investments

MFS Investment Management has historically been best known for its equity funds — but it’s the firm’s Municipal High-Income Fund (MMHYX) that stands out as a gem of consistency.

Clearly Loomis Sayles is not going to pay heed to the weekly ups and downs of bond market activity with this fund.

Q&A with BNY Mellon Managing Director, Global Financial Institutions Joseph Keenan

Faced with the loss of stimulus aid, state and local governments are hoping the economy will rebound in time to support their budgets and defuse market concerns over credit downgrades and possible bond defaults, market participants said in their outlooks for 2011.

Record municipal bond mutual fund redemptions have emerged as a threat to the rally most market participants expected to kick off early next year, as the anticipated slowdown in the supply of new bonds is met with a wave of selling by mutual funds.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11,573.49 on the last trading day before Christmas. That's up 10.6 percent from a year ago. And 37.5% from two years ago.

Investors are also likely to move into corporate bonds and real estate.

With low interest rates set to persist, yield will become the all-encompassing priority for investors in 2011, prompting them to move out of government bonds and cash back into equities, corporate bonds and real estate, Aberdeen Asset Management predicts.

More than half of the people in eight nations around the world cite the economy as their biggest concern, and that jumps to 70% for Americans and 71% for Japanese, a poll of 4,000 people over the Internet by Survey Sampling finds.

Americans’ financial outlook has improved somewhat but is still muted, causing a majority to plan to save more and continue to cut back on spending, a Harris Interactive survey of 2,331 adults in early December found.

Frontier nation stocks may help to diversify a global portfolio

Life insurance seems to be the breakout product of 2010 on many levels for bank brokerage programs.

Many advisors have remained bullish over the past two years, telling investors to put money to work in this hot market.

The tax-free money market fund industry continues to shrink rapidly, squeezing what had been a major source of short-term credit for municipalities and arguably leading to higher borrowing costs for state and local governments.

Both stock and bond funds saw net withdrawals last week.

Investors withdrew $8.48 billion from long-term funds in the week ended Dec. 15, the Investment Company Institute said Wednesday. The lion’s share of those withdrawals came from bond funds, which lost $8.62 billion. The week earlier, bond funds had outflows of $1.66 billion.

One of the postings after a recent chat has started us all on a discussion of another possible way to handle this macroeconomic chore: Actually do your own evaluation of the markets and decide whether to be in or out.

Experts increasingly believe the bond rally has run its course.

Although stocks didn’t rally until the fourth quarter of this year, that momentum could continue into 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column Wednesday. Thus, the two-year-long aversion to stocks and stock funds could finally be coming to an end.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney characterized its outlook for 2011 with the phrase “recovery becomes expansion.” The business-cycle recovery in the global economy that began in the summer of 2009 is now an expansion, it says in a new report.