Investments

Bank-based advisors produced an average $16,728 in December, up from just $14,712 in November.

Nearly two-thirds of current ETF owners bought the funds on their own. More than a quarter of them have advisors—they’re just not using them.

Cumberland Offers Safer Strategy

New York State will cease investigation into the December 2007 sale of auction-rate securities by UBS' former head of municipal securities.

Exchange-traded funds, once the province only of institutional investors, are increasingly resonating with wealthy investors, The Wall Street Journal reports.

American Funds has sold $187 million, or 99% of its original $190 million, holdings via three mutual funds in PetroChina shares, a company Investors Against Genocide has railed against for funding genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The latest SEC filings show the fund company’s holdings as of Dec. 31 at a mere $2.7 million.

Firms need to beef up customer service staffing and most of them are woefully unprepared for these changes.

Transamerica Life Insurance Co. has enhanced the guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit schedule for its Retirement Income Choice 1.2 and Retirement Income Choice 1.4 annuity riders. Each rider now pays one percentage more a year.

Investment managers are cautiously optimistic about stocks in the coming year but more guarded about bonds, Towers Watson found in a survey of 98 managers with $13.3 trillion of assets under management. They foresee economic growth, albeit modestly.

Investment managers around the world are cautiously optimistic about stocks in the coming year but more guarded about bonds, Towers Watson found in a survey of 98 managers with $13.3 trillion of assets under management. They foresee economic growth, albeit modestly.

When Mary Schapiro took office as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, she faced a myriad of issues related to the financial crisis—and outlined a series of new regulations that, so far, have come up short, The Washington Post reports.

BlackRock isn’t satisfied with its December 2009 acquisition of Barclays Global Investors, according to a Daily Mail of London report. Now the $2.7 trillion investment giant is considering buying hedge fund manager of managers Man Group.

Charles Schwab is attracting a slew of new assets, and daily average trades are rising. New and established clients brought the company $6 billion of net new assets in January, according to its monthly market activity report. Total client assets rose 27% from a year earlier, to $1.401 trillion, but were down 2% from December because of difficult market conditions.

Tom O’Halloran, manager of the Lord Abbett Developing Growth Fund, a small-cap fund that has increased 43% over the past year and 5.5% over the past decade—putting it in the top 3% of its peers, believes technology stocks will lead a continued market rebound.

JPMorgan’s five-year plan to boost its mutual fund business appears to be paying off, with the company attracting $26 billion in 2008, making it the third best-selling fund family for the year, excluding money market funds, behind Vanguard and PIMCO. In 2004, investors redeemed $1.6 billion from JPMorgan funds. Still, however, with $91 billion in assets under management, however, JPMorgan is now the 14th-largest fund company in the nation.

Average 401(k) balances ended 2009 at $64,200, rising 28% for the year and 5.7% in the fourth quarter, Fidelity reported Wednesday, citing the activity of its 11 million participants in more than 17,000 defined contribution plans.

To enable portfolio managers of its target-date funds to respond more nimbly to extreme market volatility, starting in April, AllianceBernstein will allow these funds to move up to 20% of their assets from equities and real estate investment trusts into bonds and cash.

Fidelity Investments may possess the largest supermarket of mutual funds, $3.2 trillion of assets under administration and $1.5 trillion under management.

Bank brokerage revenue fell 14% in 2009 in relative terms across banks of all sizes, according to new data from Kehrer-LIMRA.

The Boston company may have the largest supermarket of mutual funds, but it’s no longer just about offering a wide selection of mutual funds or getting companies set up with retirement benefits programs.