Mutual funds

The Securities and Exchange Commission is promising to take another look at revising or eliminating 12b-1 fees this year, now that the financial crisis seems to be abating.

Financial planners, watch your backs. Financial Engines, a retirement plan advisor co-founded by a Nobel Prize winner, completed an initial public offering Monday that blew the doors off the IPO market and affirmed investor belief in a business model that offers low-cost sophisticated retirement advice to individual investors.

American investors remain confused about this economic recovery, according to monthly data from Morningstar.

The Investment Company Institute is on board with many government reforms intended to make money market funds more secure, but not all of them.

SEI is offering enhanced, online portfolio and account monitoring services for wealth managers, to help them deal with increasing regulations concerning account reviews.

The unwinding of the Federal Reserve's liquidity programs is unlikely to boost the sickly yields on tax-free money market funds, participants say.

U.S. households increasingly are making retirement investment decisions on their own, often placing nest-egg balances in different types of accounts at multiple institutions. And a huge chunk of that money has gone into everyday banking products.

Redemption fees successfully protect mutual funds from short-term traders, whose churning can serious hurt fund performance, according to “Redemption Fees: Reward for Punishment,” authored by three researchers at Texas Tech University’s Division of Personal Financial Planning.

But the organization remains strongly opposed to doing away with a steady net asset value, which is usually $1.00 per share, and is a fundamental feature of money market funds.

T. Rowe Price is looking to buy a stake worth $1 billion or more. T. Rowe Price, China asset management, James A.C. Kennedy

T. Rowe Price is looking to buy a stake worth $1 billion or more in China Asset Management, according to reports.

The American investor is just as confused about this economic recovery as advisors are, according to data from Morningstar.

After one 2030 target-date fund lost 41% in 2008, legislators in Washington went up in arms against the fund category. One of the most controversial proposals would have limited equity exposure in such funds, but the industry fought back on the grounds the 40 Act gives asset managers leeway to determine asset allocation on their own.

MetLife believes that the once-ignored “emerging investor” is becoming critical to adviser business as firms try to figure out how to retain and recruit new clients.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 401(k), the revolutionary retirement savings vehicle that has been annihilating pension plans, empowering individuals to take part in the stock market—and that left retirees with the misfortune of leaving the workforce in 2000 or 2008 badly off.

New research from Cogent Research suggests that advisers aren’t talking to their clients often enough about retirement income products.

After one 2030 target-date fund lost 41% in 2008, legislators in Washington went up in arms against the fund category. One of the most controversial proposals would have limited equity exposure in such funds, but the industry fought back on the grounds the 40 Act gives asset managers leeway to determine asset allocation on their own.

The SPARK Institute has released the “Universal Small Employer Retirement Savings Program” report, in which it explains how universal plans would be less expensive and easier than automatic IRAs.

Vanguard Group plans to spend more on advertising this year as it increases its spending on targeted marketing online.

More than half of ads will run online.