Investments

Edward Bernard, vice chairman of T. Rowe Price, is replacing John Murphy, chairman of Oppenheimer Funds, as chairman of the board of governors at the Investment Company Institute.

Sallie Krawcheck, the recently installed head of wealth management at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, said that the road ahead would not be easy for the few large brokerage firms left.

In an open letter to investors on its website, ProFunds says that investors “should fully understand how they work before investing.”

Bank of America plans to sell its long-term asset management business, Columbia Management, to Ameriprise Financial for as much as $1.2 billion in an all-cash deal.

Beery, Charles to Lead Distribution at Janus

Analysts Bullish on Asset Managers' Earnings, Margins for Third Quarter

NEW YORK - Regulatory officials are pondering significant changes to the way the U.S. oversees financial markets in the wake of last year's credit crisis and the failure to prevent Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme, but lawmakers will have to make some hard choices before any real changes can happen.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission's roundtable last week on how to regulate the multi-trillion-dollar securities lending industry to avoid a repeat of the billions of dollars lost in the credit crisis, the focus was on conservative investment of cash collateral and a clearinghouse to create transparency, reduce spreads and keep stock pricing efficient.

NEW YORK - Despite their sinister-sounding name, dark pools of liquidity can be very beneficial to average investors by offering mutual funds and large institutional investors an efficient way to make large trades without impacting the market.

The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Eastern Europe Index Fund began trading on the NYSE Arca Friday.

A Massachusetts court ruled that the government did not impede the free speech rights of hedge fund Bulldog Investors manager Philip Goldstein by restricting his website only to qualified investors.

If there is anything positive to be gleaned from the financial crisis, it is that 401(k) plan designs need to be revised so they are more resistant to extreme volatility and market downturns, Putnam Investments CEO Robert L. Reynolds told executives at the National Investment Company Service Association’s East Coast Regional Meeting in Boston.

Resource and metal mutual funds both rose an impressive 11% in September and are among the best-performing sectors year-to-date, potentially signaling an economic rebound, The Globe & Mail reports.

Invesco is in the running to acquire the fund business of Van Kampen, which has $550 billion of assets under management, and the deal could be valued anywhere between $1 billion and $2 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Invesco and TCW Group have raised more than $1.13 billion from private investors to buy toxic assets from the government as part of the Public-Private Investment Program, the Department of the Treasury indicated.

Robert McCann has settled his lawsuit with his former employer Bank of America/Merrill Lynch today, clearing the way for him to possibly head up the U.S. brokerage arm of UBS.

Standard & Poor’s has launched four securities lending indexes based on intermediary prices for stocks in its top three benchmark indexes, the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600, as well as the sector sub-indexes for the three indexes.

Jefferies Asset Management has introduced what it believes is the first commodities exchange-traded fund tied to an equities rather than a futures index, and it is planning other equities-based commodities ETFs in the near future.

“Move past the crisis,” Barclays Wealth urges investors in its latest monthly strategy update. It would be wise to position for the economic recovery since most economists are revising their growth forecasts for 2010 upwards.

After acquiring more than $1 trillion in asset-backed paper from money market funds, the Federal Reserve is considering borrowing that money back from the funds through reverse repos to ease the stimulus plan and avoid inflation, and most funds think that is a good idea.