Tag Archives: new products

Will Merrill Lynch’s new online brokerage offering make a difference?

This post originally appeared on my new site all about investing in the age of social media, Tradestreaming.  If you haven’t checked it out, you should.  Sign up for the free newsletter as well.
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There’s been a lot of speculation about what or what not Merrill Lynch (now owned by Bank of United States of America) [...]

Mint.com takes bold step into financial planning

This post originally appeared on Tradestreaming.com, the site for my new book and where I will be posting primarily about consumer financial.  New Rules will begin to take more of a financial industry bent to it.
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So, top-dog personal finance website, Mint.com, just announced a further step into financial planning with some goals-based tools [...]

eBay of investment advisors kaChing now servicing IRAs

eBay of investment advisors, kaChing announced today that they’re providing servicing of IRA plans. That means that someone with an IRA of at least $10k and the desire to have kaChing investment managers take a crack at managing his portfolio, can now do it.

State of the Art: What’s hot in financial product advertising

It’s always a good idea to check out what’s being advertised to see what the financial product firms are pushing. Some of this is horse-leading-the-cart stuff, but sometimes financial products are developed based on demand for such things. Looking at advertising in the financial industry is a momentum-driven way to look at trends [...]

Reuters Insider: good for financial content but not sure about investors

VOD for investors
Thomson Reuters unveiled its Reuters Insider product today. Geared towards clients of investment terminals, Insider is essentially an aggregator of video content, sucking in both Reuters proprietary content and that from outside partners.  It’s going to be like a professional version of Seeking Alpha — but with video, not text.
Trader You Tube?  [...]

The Atlantic on WSJ iPad app: It’s working

Interesting analysis on The Atlantic today regarding the WSJ’s paid content experiment on the iPad.
Let’s remember (from the article):

Apple sold about 500,000 iPad units in its first week
3200 WSJ iPad apps sold so far at $17.29/mo (or bundled together with other editions)
30,000 current WSJ subs trialing a free version of the app — so room for [...]

More hedge funds trading the buzz

With the explosion of content on the Internet, particularly in real-time social media, investors are beginning to get access to tools to trade sentiment.  Where old-school investors knew — and profited — from buying on the rumor and selling on the news — the participative aspect of social media is changing the ways news/rumors/sentiment is [...]

Covestor pimps out search functionality

The investment arm of leading investment community, Covestor (see my coverage of the firm), just pimped out its search functionality.
With the new changes, it’s easier to drill down on managed portfolios by strategy, return, and risk metrics.  From the search results, investors can lean more about individual portfolios or allocate capital to them, via a [...]

Read the fine print, investors: Some mutual fund fees higher than thought

We’ve written for a while that for certain purposes, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are a better mousetrap.
As Mutual Funds 2.0, ETFs have introduced:

new ways to implement investing ideas (eg. country exposure to Poland, Chile, etc.)
made existing ideas easier to trade (leveraged long and short funds, buy-write strategies)
provided continuous pricing (unlike Mutual Funds that price [...]

ETFs, overindexing and the power of financial brands

Just doing some thinking about the growth and future of the ETF industry:
In my eyes, ETFs began as a second-generation of mutual funds with the following characteristics:

Passively managed: ETFs were passively managed (though that’s changing), building upon Jack Bogle’s success at Vanguard.  Most research at the time clung to the Efficient Market Hypothesis and academics [...]