Investments

Hedge funds will continue to suffer poor results and redemptions for the next four years, Sanford C. Bernstein Analyst Brad Hintz told Reuters. And over the next year, one in four hedge funds will shut down, Hintz added.

Socially responsible investing has been offering one of the few positives for investors during the recession, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel reports.

While money funds have provided one of the few bright spots for the mutual fund industry recently—with $3.9 trillion in assets, they currently hold about 40% of all of the total $9.4 trillion held in mutual funds—they are headed for reforms that could reduce their current paltry yields of 0.29% even further, the Associated Press reports. The government is likely to restrict the funds' holdings to avoid another fund breaking the buck, as the Primary Fund did last September.

Aviva Taps Ranges, Jacobs For Development, CIO

Thinking about retirement is anything but positive and encouraging, even for those in their 20s with a 40-year time horizon for saving. Most planners recommend an absolutely ungodly sum of cash as the entry point to safe and sound years. The government continues to predict the demise of Social Security. Insurers warn about soaring healthcare and long-term care costs. And now, with the market having wiped out $11.1 trillion in market wealth since it peaked in October 2007, retiring is absolutely unrealistic for many.

Don't Regulate Money Funds Like Banks: Fed Chairman

The Investment Company Institute has named Dean R. Sackett III and Donald C. Auerbach as leaders of its government affairs staff.

Congress is considering whether to make major revisions to the fair-value accounting rules that have created so much controversy lately. Possible changes include suspending the rules, improving value-at-risk measurements and reinstating the uptick rule.

Invesco's Atlantic Trust Private Wealth Management plans to take advantage of the "chaos" in the financial services industry to add assets and customers, according to its new chief executive officer.

The mutual fund industry is eager to hear the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case that could determine the fate of the Gartenberg standard, an old legal precedent used to determine whether mutual fund fees are too high that has set a high burden of proof for investors and spared the industry from lawsuits.

Two financial industry leaders are calling on Congress to enact concrete fiduciary standards to help restore investors' trust in Wall Street and the capital markets.

Integrity Mutual Funds has sold its mutual fund division to the employee-owned Corridor Investors and Viking Fund Management.

Money market funds netted $10.71 billion in the week ended March 11, even as the seven-day simple yield fell to a record low of 29 basis points. Assets in money funds now total $3.835 trillion.

For the past two years, activists have implored large fund companies to divest holdings in securities linked to human rights abuses. Now Vanguard has decided to make socially responsible investing screening official.

Fidelity has launched three mutual funds with a long-term focus designed for sale by financial advisers—the Fidelity Advisor Global Balanced, Fidelity Advisor Worldwide and Fidelity Advisor Convertible Securities funds.

Investors in need of cash or traumatized by the Bernard Madoff scandal will continue to redeem hedge fund shares in droves, HedgeWorld News predicts, shrinking the industry by 30% this year to as low as $1 trillion. That was the size of the industry in 2005.

The Investment Company Institute has named Dean R. Sackett III and Donald C. Auerbach as leaders of its government affairs staff.

While they have been testing the social networking waters sporadically for as long as the past two years, fund companies are increasingly turning to social networks to communicate with investors.

Fidelity Investments is treating investors’ unease with the markets as an opportunity to help them revisit their retirement goals, risk tolerance, household budget and preparedness for job loss, by holding 500 seminars around the nation, offering online tools and running ads.

The financial crisis has taken a serious toll on millionaires, with their ranks falling 27% in 2008 from 9.2 million at the beginning of the year to 6.7 million by year-end, Spectrem Group found. That brings the total down to 2003 levels, when there were 6.2 million millionaires in the nation.