Investments

New Fidelity Ads Tell Investors to 'Turn Here'

Memani Leads Fixed Income at Oppenheimer

After graduating from Boston College in 1971, John V. Murphy began his career at Arthur Andersen & Co.

It's counterintuitive-wealth managers are ratcheting up the price and providing lower returns on variable annuities. Some providers have doubled prices in the past six months, and more changes are expected.

Mutual funds have been able to thrive for the past 85 years thanks to their ability to adapt to changing markets and help investors stay diversified during good times and bad.

Investors seeking safety and stability have recently been moving massive amounts of their assets into money market mutual funds, causing the funds to swell to nearly $4 trillion and making them the single largest mutual fund asset class, according to the Investment Company Institute.

State Street Corp. has introduced a new automated service to help fund companies lower their operating costs. Linked to the firm’s global accounting and fund administration systems, it automates manual or partially automated accounting processes in the back office.

Financial advisers proved their worth in the second half of 2008, with their clients' average returns 16 percentage points higher than the S&P 500, Fidelity found in a survey of 300 investors and 200 advisers.

Fifteen percent, or 778 hedge funds, closed in the final quarter of 2008, directly due to the financial markets meltdown, according to Hedge Fund Research. That topped the previous record for quarterly closings, which occurred in the third quarter of 2008 when 344 hedge funds shut down.

IndexIQ has submitted filings to roll out five exchange-traded funds, each of which will track indexes created by IndexIQ subsidiary Financial Development HoldCo LLC.

The Investment Company Institute’s money fund working group has recommended a series of measures to make money funds more stable, less prone to massive redemptions all at once and more transparent—all in an effort to help the funds maintain investors’ faith and their $1 NAV.

American Funds will lay off an additional 500 people this year, on top of the 500 who lost their jobs in January. That will leave the 80-year-old firm with a workforce of about 8,500.

Instead of praising investors for making the “Smart Move” by moving to Fidelity, the firm’s new advertising campaign calls them into action by urging them to “Turn Here.”

Samuel Israel, Bayou Group

Citi has created the first web-based platform to handle all of the various types of investment products inclued in a unified managed household account, with TIAA-CREF coming on board the first asset manager to sign on. TIAA-CREF will be using the platform, OpenWealth, in its fee-based wealth management division.

Janus is merging its mutual fund units catering to advisor-sold and retail direct, a move many see as wise as more investors turn to advice-driven channels.

In what would be a tremendous upset in the mutual fund industry, Barclays is shopping its iShares exchange-traded fund unit.

Power Financial experienced its first quarterly loss in 15 years, losing $773 million, or $1.12 a share, compared with profits of $532 million, or 73 cents a share, in the fourth quarter of 2007.

JPMorgan Funds was the best-selling mutual fund family in 2008, taking in $140 billion, Financial Times reports. Nearly all of that money was in money market funds, for excluding those flows, JPMorgan was hit with $1.3 billion in outflows for the 12 months through February.

Federated Investors has launched three value funds under the Clover Value fund family name, the Federated Clover Value Fund, Federated Clover Mid value Fund and Federated Clover Small Value Fund. Subsidiary Federated Clover Investment Advisors is advising the funds, which will employ fundamental, bottom-up research and be sold through broker/dealers, banks and other financial intermediaries.