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May 01, 2009 at 04:00 AM
What Sam Stovall calls a “mega-meltdown” and others call a recession is likely to end by the fourth quarter of 2009, and while it won’t be much of an upturn then, at least “we may be at a nadir for the market now,” the chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor’s told the wealth managers and high-net-worth investors in attendance at the inaugural Wealth Forum sponsored by Investment Advisor and the Wealth Management Exchange on April 1 at New York’s Yale Club. In fact, says Stovall, “we possibly hit a bottom on March 9.” The numbers show that this bear market is the second worst since 1929, Stovall reports, and the worst is not over: S&P expects unemployment to peak at just below 10% by the middle of this year…
Payden & Rygel introduced April 15 the Payden Corporate Bond Fund (PYACX), a no-load fund without a 12b-1 fee that will focus on investing in investment-grade corporate bonds, and uses Barclays’ U.S. Corporate Investment Grade Index as its benchmark . . .
As part of what it called its ongoing efforts to come up with easy ways for people to plan and save for retirement by showing what consumers’ peers are doing about retirement planning, ING recently launched a new online tool, INGCompareMe.com, which “allows people to look at what other folks in similar situations are doing, in the hopes that it may be a catalyst to get them to take action,” says Richard Mason, president of corporate markets for ING U.S. Retirement Services…
Barclays PLC announced April 9 that it had agreed to sell its Barclays Global Investors’ iShares ETF business to a new limited partnership formed by private equity firm CVC Capital Partners Group in a deal valued at $4.4 billion. BGI’s iShares is the largest ETF provider both in the number of products, 369 ETFs, and assets of $296.8 billion, giving it a 46.8% market share, far ahead of the second largest ETF provider, State Street Global Advisors, which has 102 ETFs and $103.5 billion in assets for a 16.3% market share…
