Fidelity Charitable Enhances Philanthropic Options
Fidelity Charitable, which manages one of the nation's largest donor-advised fund programs, is creating a new line of investment options and a new online tool designed to simplify decision-making for donors as they choose how to invest their charitable contributions.
The new investment offering has seven asset allocation pools to provide diversification among multiple asset classes in a single investment and across the risk spectrum from conservative to aggressive growth.
In the donor-advised fund program, Fidelity Charitable enables donors and their advisors to make financial contributions to individual giving accounts and then recommend how those contributions are invested and ultimately granted to support their favorite causes.
For advisors who manage the charitable assets in their clients' giving accounts, the new pools add to the investment options already available to them through the charitable investment advisor program. This allows qualified financial advisors to develop and manage custom portfolios for a donor's giving account of $250,000 or more and enables the advisors to invest in stocks, bonds and mutual funds, as well as alternative investments.
Fidelity Charitable is also introducing a pool selector-an online tool to help donors determine the asset allocation pool that best supports their risk tolerance, time horizon and philanthropic goals.
Additional information can be found at www.fidelitycharitable.org.
Russell Adds Small Cap Investments
Russell Investments is expanding its investment discipline indexes to include U.S. small-cap indexes. Four new investment discipline indexes will be added to Russell's lineup, each reflecting a particular approach to small-cap security selection commonly practiced by professional money managers.
The new investment discipline indexes are the Russell U.S. Small Cap Aggressive Growth Index, the Consistent Growth Index, the Low P/E Index and the Contrarian Index.
Additional information can be found at the investment discipline index series section of www.Russell.com/indexes.
Loomis Offers Bank Loan Assets
Loomis, Sayles & Company is launching the Loomis Sayles Senior Floating Rate and Fixed Income Fund, which is designed to offer investors a more flexible approach to the floating-rate bank loan asset class than traditional funds in the same category do.
The new fund primarily invests in floating-rate bank loans, but can also allocate to the entire range of fixed-income asset classes, depending on the portfolio managers' outlook for the credit cycle.
The managers also have the ability to invest up to 35% of net assets in other fixed-income securities, such as investment-grade and high-yield corporates, convertibles, and securitized and government issues.
Teucrium Launches Agriculture Commodities
Teucrium Trading LLC, Santa Fe, N.M., has added three new single-commodity exchange-traded product funds to its offering of agriculture and natural products.
The Teucrium Soybean Fund, the Teucrium Sugar Fund and the Teucrium Wheat Fund are being offered as single-commodity products for the agriculture space. The funds join the Teucrium Corn, Natural Gas and Crude Oil Funds.
This provides an investment vehicle for investing directly and exclusively in a single product without having to trade futures contracts. Additional information can be found at www.teucrium.com.
John Hancock Launches Retirement Program
John Hancock Financial Network is creating Retirement Ready, a new retirement income program designed to help John Hancock Financial professionals and advisors maximize sustainable retirement income for their clients.
The focus of the Retirement Ready program is a tool that determines each client's optimal product mix to provide a quantitative measurement of the relative likelihood that his portfolio will generate the income he needs for the rest of his life. Education and training materials, an expense calculator and other tools are provided for advisors to create personal client reports.
Invesco Offers Chinese Bonds
Invesco PowerShares Capital Management LLC, a provider of exchange-traded funds, has launched the PowerShares Chinese Yuan Dim Sum Bond Portfolio. The fund will provide access to Chinese yuan-denominated "dim sum" bonds issued and settled outside mainland China. It will have an expense ratio of 0.45% and is expected to issue monthly distributions.