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The article reports on the efforts by the U.S. Labor Department to protect investors by creating a rule aimed at fixing the flaws of the existing regulatory framework. Under the proposed final rule, more financial professionals are required to act as fiduciaries and put the investors' interest first. The rule will cover retirement plans, annuities, and related investment vehicles.

The article reports on the decade-long bull market that keeps rolling which became the longest such run in U.S. history on August 22, 2018. Topics discussed include the question faced by investors of whether they should be taking some money off the table and ideas for investors such as considering whether their tolerance has changed in terms of what sort of drop they could tolerate and considering how much risk their plans require.

The article discusses the rule implemented by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on June 30, 2020 which requires brokers who sell financial products to act in their customers' best interest.

The article discusses the engagement of an outside investor to share in the down payments of aspiring U.S. home owners as of June 2018. It states that shared equity firm Unison provides at least half of a consumer's down payment in exchange for a home's appreciation value profit when it is sold, and that it aims to provide home buyers with more options. Also noted is the home buyer's need to calculate upfront cash now versus less proceeds later before entering into shared equity.

The article informs that new rules by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would help ensure investors get best advice from investment advisors and mentions to pick an independent, fee-only adviser to act as a fiduciary.

The article reports that U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) has voted to pass Regulation Best Interest and mentions that the changes will be helping Main Street investors by tightening the standard governor brokers who sell investment products.

This week's Your Money column examines the best approach to rebalancing your investment portfolio -- in other words, reshuffling your investments back to their original mix to reduce your risks in the market. While most investors should periodically re-evaluate their portfolios to make sure they don't require any major changes, most of the time all investors need to do is a little maintenance. Perhaps you just need to sell a portion of your stock funds and buy some bonds so that you're not becoming too bloated in any one investment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some big retirement plans offer investors the chance to hire an independent adviser that can help them choose their investments. But your plan provider will soon be able to offer the advice itself, as long as it meets rules issued recently by the Department of Labor. Before the new regulations, which are effective Dec. 27, 401(k), individual retirement plan providers were required to hire an independent adviser to provide advice. That's because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the law known as Erisa that governs retirement plans, prohibited advisers from recommending investments if they were paid for other services like administering the plans in the first place. This was to avoid conflicts of interest where the administrator would put its own mutual funds on the menu and push them on participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investors have flocked to the ''set it and forget it'' style of mutual funds known as target-date funds, where the mix of investments automatically becomes more conservative as the retirement date approaches. But when the markets plunged, it became readily apparent that some funds did a better job of protecting investors than others. What was most surprising, however, was the wide variation in performance among funds with the same target date. And most alarmingly, some 2010 funds lost more than the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vanguard is effectively cutting its fees on certain mutual funds by allowing a wider swath of investors to invest in its Admiral shares, which carry lower expenses. Now, investors will need a total account balance of $10,000 per fund to qualify for the lower-cost index funds, down from $100,000. But investors will need an account balance of at least $50,000 per fund to qualify for the Admiral share class in actively managed mutual funds. A total of 52 Vanguard mutual funds offer Admiral shares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educated investors know that past investment returns are not necessarily the best predictors of future results. It's mutual fund and other expenses that really matter. Morningstar, in an act of radical and admirable transparency, recently put that assertion to the test and found that expenses actually helped investors make better decisions than its own vaunted star-rating system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Target-date funds have come under fire in recent months for failing to shelter investors, especially those near retirement, from the market maelstrom. Many of the funds -- which are supposed to have an increasingly conservative investment mix as an investor reaches a retirement date -- failed investors last year. But so did a lot of broadly diversified portfolios carefully customized by financial planners. The market collapse spared no one (except for those heavily invested in Treasuries, of course). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed more stringent rules for money market funds on Wednesday in an attempt to avert runs like the one that erupted last fall. Until last September, money market funds had been deemed a safe place to store cash. Then investors rushed to pull their cash out of the Reserve Primary fund, a multibillion-dollar fund, during the worst of the financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the American government continues to pump money into the economy, many investors have started to worry that inflation is inevitable. Most economists don't expect inflation to arrive anytime soon. But nobody really knows when it will appear or how corrosive its effects will be. In the meantime, financial planners are suggesting that investors make sure that their portfolios are well positioned to withstand any impact on their hard-earned money -- before it's too late. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IF the last 18 months have taught Americans anything, it's that market collapses don't discriminate. Even the most sophisticated and affluent investors lost big chunks of their fortunes. Access to the most exclusive hedge funds did not always limit the damage, as many participants had hoped it would. As a result, a new mentality has emerged among some investors, who are rethinking the traditional approach to asset allocation. The upheaval in the markets and in the broader economy has led them to question long-honored principles of investing and to sound a death knell, at least for now, for the buy-and-hold mind-set. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When wealthy investors are willing to hand over a sizable sum to a single money manager they heard about at the country club, certain first principles of investing bear repeating. That manager, Bernard L. Madoff, is accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a fraud scheme that may be the biggest in Wall Street history. But if it ends up in the record books, it will be because scores of people made outsize bets on his prowess without taking the time to fully understand what they were investing in. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the experiences of small-time investors who helped drive the stock price of struggling video game retailer GameStop. The price reached a staggering 483 dollars per share before dropping to 63.77 dollars in February 2021. Also cited are the gain made by real estate broker Shawn Daumer from his GameStop investment and the move by brokerage firms like Robinhood to restrict trading of GameStop and other companies with unusual gains in prices.