Mutual funds

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.

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.”

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.

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.