With stock trading, there seems to be an app, of course, for just about anything. Here are some of the best ones out there today.

Rule changes brought on by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act are expected to produce the most change in the way trading in contracts involving interest-rate commitments.

The Investment Company Institute has asked the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration to make electronic delivery the default method of communicating with 401(k) plan participants, unless a shareholder expressly asks to receive paper delivery.

Forget ATM machines. Financial institutions that want to stay competitive are going to have to work the phones if they want to hang on to their customers in the future. That is to say, they’ll have to make their services accessible by smartphone.

State Street Corp. this week said it will roll out a new mobile application for executive-level portfolio and fund managers' iPads in the fall, giving clients real-time access to portfolio and risk exposure data on their beloved mobile devices.

BNY Mellon said that it had begun expanding its middle office outsourcing service for hedge funds to North America and Asia.

A former employee pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to helping Bernie Madoff create false records for investors.

State Street Bank this week announced plans to offer a cloud computing service geared to investors and investment professionals.

Patsystems said it added London to its network of trading and risk management hubs for futures.

Cinnober Financial Technology introduced a trading system that it said performs "door to door" matching of orders in under 10 millionths of a second.

Google Inc. isn't asking for a share of the payments revenue generated with its new mobile wallet. Nevertheless, partnering with the search engine juggernaut could be a trade-off for banks.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has fined a former trader at Morgan Stanley $150,000 and barred him from the securities industry for two years after he fooled its risk management system with bogus equity swap deals.

Could another dotcom bubble be on the horizon? Less than a month after social networking site LinkedIn blew up in its blockbuster initial public offering, online coupon seller Groupon filed its S-1 form with the SEC.

linkedFA, a social networking web site designed specifically for financial professionals, announced a strategic relationship with Thomson Reuters, the New York-based business information service, to provide financial data to advisors using the social network.

The technology division of NYSE Euronext said its Capital Markets Community Platform will provide direct, on-demand access to high-performance, low-latency services from NYSE Technologies, including its Superfeed of market data, its Risk Management Gateway, its Managed Services Hub, and its global Liquidity Center Network.

Despite the fact that social media is critical for marketing and growth of financial advisory practices, a significant number of advisors are still concerned about using social media for compliance reasons, according to a Peak Advisor Alliance survey released on Wednesday.

ING Direct's customers now have one more hoop to jump through to use a personal financial management site. ING isn't apologizing for the inconvenience, and perhaps counterintuitively, PFM providers see no reason ING should.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney made the inevitable official by allowing a test group of 600 wealth management advisors to use Twitter in a limited capacity to connect and interact with clients and prospective new clients.

Hubspot’s latest study shows that the number of companies that blog has grown from 48% in 2009 to 65% this year. Indeed, it appears that non-bloggers are fast becoming the minority, and it’s not hard to see why: companies that blog have 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages, compared to those that do not.

Investors clearly are buying into the social media hype, sending LinkedIn shares through the roof in their first trading day.