The expected reduction in front-end sales charges by large mutual fund companies may help stimulate sagging sales for Section 529 college savings plans.
DWS Investments is lowering sales charges and break points on some of its mutual funds, a move that could foreshadow industrywide price cutting to attract disillusioned investors, according to observers.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a list of regulations for money market funds that goes far beyond proposed reforms issued in March by the Investment Company Institute.
Actively managed exchange traded funds are finally starting to trickle into the market.
As might have been expected, the extreme nature of the economic downturn continues to spawn ways for investors to navigate the financial markets.
Fund managers, urging financial advisers not to pull client assets out of underperforming funds, painted 2008 as an anomaly at the Morningstar Investment Conference 2009 in Chicago last week.
Federated Investors Inc. announced today that the firm has reached a definitive agreement to acquire $233 million in assets of two of Cincinnati-based Touchstone Investments’ mutual funds.
With many managers failing to generate strong returns, trading costs are harder for investors to stomach.
Two-thirds of investors believe that target date funds need to be combined with other funds to achieve a proper mix for their retirement portfolios, a white paper released yesterday by Janus Capital Group Inc. of Denver suggests.
Morningstar Inc. will launch ratings and research reports on target date fund series in the third quarter, according to John Rekenthaler, the firm's vice president of research.
Mutual fund expense ratios declined in 2008 for the fourth consecutive year, seeing an average reduction of 0.036% industrywide, according to a report by New York-based research firm Lipper Inc.
Investors poured money into equity mutual funds, including exchange traded funds, in April in a reversal from the previous month, when those funds experienced net outflows, according to a report released yesterday by Financial Research Corp. of Boston.
Financial advisers who handle retirement plans have noted that plan sponsors are now very much aware of the performance of target date funds. But sponsors don't really understand the reason for the performance, according to 76% of advisers polled by my firm.
The Obama administration's strategy to ad-dress the economic crisis may be making the problem worse.
Mutual funds that invest in technology stocks are producing great returns — a sign that the market in general is improving, some say — and investors are starting to respond.
In what advisers say is a flight to safety and returns, municipal bond funds attracted more than $20 billion in new cash from January through May 13, according to the Washington-based Investment Company Institute.
A bill to defer taxation on dividends that are reinvested in mutual funds has received support from the Investment Company Institute.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor will hold a joint hearing June 18 on the subject of target date funds.
Signaling greater stability in the credit markets, most of the major fund complexes offering Treasury money market mutial funds have discontinued their participation in the federal guarantee program on those funds.
Expect lower yields from money market mutual funds in the coming months as a result of reforms being contemplated by the SEC and Investment Company Institute, according to a white paper released this month and announced today by Capital Advisors Group Inc. of Newton, Mass.
