Mutual funds

Equities continue their climb, notching gains of 15.7% so far this year, as measured by the S&P 500. This comes after a 13% gain last year. Against that backdrop, we asked Morningstar to rank the top mutual funds in the U.S. for the past 12 months. We limited it to open-end funds that have at least $100 million in assets and that have been in business for at least five years.

Vanguard’s exchange-traded funds continue to increase in popularity among investors in the United States, the company reported today.

Conventional wisdom has it that today’s low investment yields tend to harm low-income retirees, who receive little or nothing from the bank accounts and bonds they had counted on for spending money. That’s certainly the case, but a recent study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found that low yields have even more impact on younger workers as well as on people with high incomes. Agreeing with those conclusions, Barton Close, vice president of investments, in the Chattanooga office of Raymond James & Associates, told On Wall Street, “Those low yields have turned around my strategies 180 degrees. Now I put more focus on current cash flow.”

One of the leading contenders to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, Lawrence Summers, has been a paid consultant to Citigroup and other financial institutions, which opponents of his nomination are likely to focus on.

A replacement for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will not be named by President Obama until this fall according to a senior White House official.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch launched Monday an analytics dashboard aimed at helping treasurers handle their cash.

Former UBS AG executive Peter Ghavami was sentenced to 18 months in prison for rigging what should have been competitive bids to handle municipal-bond investment deals.

Goldman Sachs portfolio manager and executive Donald J. Mulvihill Jr. died on July 19 at age 56 in the Chicago area.

Asset management mergers and acquisitions are on the rise and all signs are pointing to another healthy year for deal activity.

Many large managers of municipal bond funds with Detroit paper said they haven't heard any panic from their investing clients since the city filed for bankruptcy and many of their funds have lost value.

BNY Mellon has been appointed as the successor depositary bank for the Global Depositary Receipt (GDR) program of JSC Federal Grid Company of Unified Energy System. Each Federal Grid Company GDR represents 500 ordinary shares and trades on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol "FEES." Federal Grid Company's ordinary shares trade on the Moscow Exchange under the symbol "FEES."

A Texas man has been accused by regulators of running a Ponzi scheme involving the digital currency Bitcoin. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Trendon Shavers with defrauding investors of nearly $150,000 worth of bitcoins through Bitcoin Savings and Trust, an online investment scheme he ran, and of making false claims while soliciting investments online in 2011 and 2012.

Financial advisors across the spectrum-at registered investment advisors, wirehouses and independent broker-dealers-are at a loss when it comes to understanding liquidity of exchange-traded funds, according to new research from Cerulli Associates.

Demographics have led to desperation, and the next steps on that path have been towards the rich recruiting bonuses offered by wirehouses to productive advisors. Those tempting payments aren’t going away, but further improvements are “highly unlikely,” according to Mark Elzweig, who heads a New York-based executive search firm focusing on the asset management community.

Bloomberg — Herbert Allison Jr., the onetime president of Merrill Lynch & Co. who oversaw the U.S. government’s bank-bailout program following the financial crisis that led to his former company becoming a unit of Bank of America Corp., has died. He was 69.

Participants in the 2013 CFO Outlook Mid-Year Update gave the U.S. economy an average score of 58 out of 100. This figure was up f rom 49 in the last survey conducted late last year. The global economy received a score of 51, up from 45.

Earlier this month, Nuveen Asset Management revealed that its Chief Equity Strategist and Senior Portfolio Manager Bob Doll will be taking on a new slate of equity funds including traditional, specialty and alternative funds.

Over the past two decades, investors have paid less and less to own shares of mutual funds. That's because investors demand low-cost funds, and because the fund industry is one characterized by competition, innovation, and economies of scale.

The Securities and Exchange Commission together with financial regulators of the member states of the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA) have established supervisory arrangements. This comes as part of a long-term strategy to improve the oversight of certain entities in the asset management industry that operate across national borders.

The newly released 2013 Responsible Investment Report highlights TIAA-CREF’s responsible investment strategies throughout the asset classes in which it invests. The report also points out the company’s socially responsible investing portfolios.