NowMyNews

An organization that certifies and develops standards for financial planners is conducting spot checks of advisers it lists on its websites to make sure they are not misidentifying themselves as "fee only." The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards (CFP Board), in a notice sent to its 70,000 planners on Wednesday, said it would review sources of compensation for advisers who market themselves as "fee only." Advisers who are "fee only" charge customers for financial planning services and are able to market themselves as impartial in the recommendations they make to customers. Other advisers make money through commissions charged on sales and performance of financial products and investments.   true       The CFP Board will compare compensation that advisers enter on its websites to public sources such as regulatory filings and the firms' own web pages, it said. Not all advisers who use the "fee only" label will be subject to the

Greg Peters, the former class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Morgan Stanley chief global asset strategist who sounded an early alarm about the financial crisis, said on Wednesday there is currently a remote chance of another U.S. recession but bond yields are signaling a troubling scenario. Peters, now a senior portfolio manager who helps manage over $418 billion in assets at Prudential Investments, told Reuters that another recession, "is not off the table completely. The market is telling you that probability is higher today than six months ago." The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury bond has dropped conspicuously to 2.53 percent from 3 percent at the start of the year.   true       Peters says fundamental factors, led by slowing growth, are pushing yields lower. Prudential's official GDP estimate is 2.9 percent this year but the firm is moving the guidance lower. "You can see that the bond market is not buying 3 percent GDP growth." Indeed, t

When the nine-person startup he co-founded was bought by class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Facebook for a reported $15 million in January, Cemre Gungor, 27, was inundated with phone calls and emails from wealth advisers. Yet he spurned them all, opting instead to open an account with Betterment, an online financial adviser launched in 2010 that automatically invests in a portfolio of exchange traded funds based mainly on a client's age. "My personality doesn't lend itself to being the sort of person who would research good wealth managers and then trust them with making decisions. I don't want to spend any time thinking or caring about that," said Gungor, who grew up in class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Turkey and Finland before moving to the U.S. He and others of his generation are posing a challenge for wealth advisers who are streaming into Silicon Valley and San Francisco after the public stock offerings of companies such as class="ma

Companies such as class="mandelbrot_refrag"> BlackRock Inc and Standard & Poor's are taking a popular stock fund strategy and applying it to class="mandelbrot_refrag"> bonds . For more than a decade, asset managers have been creating stock funds that track indexes designed to outperform those based on their components' market value. Bond funds are the next frontier for index designers who use this "smart beta" approach to boost returns by taking advantage of market inefficiencies. class="mandelbrot_refrag"> S&P class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Dow Jones class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Indices , a unit of McGraw Hill Financial, said it expects to unveil smart beta bond indexes in the fourth quarter.   true       BlackRock has not given a timetable, but is experimenting with different ways of weighting components of the broad Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index to produce exchange-traded funds

After Detroit filed for class="mandelbrot_refrag"> bankruptcy last summer, portfolio managers at Eaton Vance municipal bond funds saw a gem hidden in the plumbing of the beleaguered Midwestern city. As the prices of 30-year class="mandelbrot_refrag"> bonds backed by Detroit's water and sewer system plunged, the Boston-based firm swooped in to become the top investor in them. The bet paid off as the Detroit class="mandelbrot_refrag"> bonds recovered to nearly full value, helping the $763 million Eaton Vance High-Yield Municipal Income Fund post a 10.76 percent year-to-date return. That is nearly double the 5.39 percent average return across nearly 600 municipal funds tracked by Lipper Inc, and ranks it No. 9 among U.S. municipal bond funds.   true       Eaton Vance's payoff is just one example of the recovery of municipal junk bond funds so far this year, after a tough 2013. Using plays on land, low borrowing costs, and distress

Investors have been flocking to highly concentrated stock mutual funds in the hope that more daring bets will produce bigger returns, but it hasn't worked out that way. So-called concentrated mutual funds - those that hold fewer than 30 class="mandelbrot_refrag"> stocks and are by nature risky - are growing far faster than other types of actively managed funds. But some 80 percent of these funds are posting performances that put them in the bottom half of their peers, according to data from class="mandelbrot_refrag"> S&P CapitalIQ. Over the five years to December 2013, the assets invested in concentrated funds jumped from $44.5 billion to approximately $117 billion, according to data from fund tracker class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Morningstar , a growth rate 67 percent greater than actively managed funds as a whole.   true       The move to riskier funds may come, ironically, as a side effect of the growing popularity of passive in

If you had to guess where a particular 78-year-old American retiree who plays bridge and has three great-grandchildren lives, what would you say? Odds are you guessed Florida, or maybe Arizona - two sunny states that have long been popular with the senior set. But you'd be wrong, at least in this case. Lois O'Grady lives in Vermillion, South Dakota.   true       "It's an easy and comfortable place to live, and very safe and friendly," says O'Grady, who moved from the relatively bustling metropolis of Omaha to be closer to her family. "It reminds me of Mayberry, if you are old enough to remember the old Andy Griffith TV show," O'Grady says. There's not a whole lot going on in the area, O'Grady admits. The population is a shade over 10,000, and there aren't too many stores apart from a Wal-Mart. But the region has another thing going for it: South Dakota was recently named the best state to retire in the nation, handily defeatin