Introducing A Social Media Directory Of Asset Managers, Broker-Dealers, Financial Advisors And Media

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Today we're publishing the start of a social media directory for the asset management industry. We've aggregated what we can and now we turn to you for your contributions.

As described in our recent eBook "Who Says You Can't? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media," (published in May 2009 but removed from the site pending an update) social media is a mixed bag for those involved in the manufacture, packaging and distribution of investment products. It's trendy and seems like fun but for some, it's too new, too transparent, too unstructured. Overall, social media is too much for many highly regulated investment companies to be comfortable with yet.

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These 3 Website Tools Advance The Understanding Of ETFs

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Little more than one month after our post about highlights on mutual fund and ETF Web sites (see 5 Random Highlights of Mutual Fund, ETF Sites)  we’re back with another installment, this time all about ETFs.

Exchange-traded funds offer the advantage of lower expenses. That’s a blanket statement that’s made when comparing mutual funds to ETFs. But, how does the cost of using ETFs compare to the cost of using no-load funds? This Rydex Investments trading expenses calculator considers all the variables and gets into the particulars.

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Understanding the volatility of an investment is always important, but you might say that it’s critical for an investor considering leveraged index funds. To that end, Direxion Funds offers a volatility tool for 10-, 30-, 90- and 180-day rolling periods. To fully appreciate this, you have to see the graphic reset as the periods change. Note that the user can customize this list by selecting a subset of funds.

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5 Random Highlights Of Mutual Fund, ETF Websites

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Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

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SPECIAL REPORT: The Effect Of The Market Meltdown On Traffic To Top Mutual Fund, ETF Web Sites

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Net outflows from equity and fixed-income funds were at record dollar levels in October, according to Lipper, Inc. How did October’s market meltdown affect traffic to mutual fund, ETF and other investment company Web sites? We’ve been eager to analyze the data.

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‘Mutual Fund’ Google Searches At 4-Year Low

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It rained all weekend in the Chicago area. That’s my excuse for why I ran a Google Trends search on “mutual funds.”

I really was just wasting time on Google Trends. It was idle curiosity that drove me to see how “Lehman” searches spiked recently and I also ran a Bear Stearns search, both just to confirm my suspicions that they’d probably enjoyed relative search obscurity until this year.

But then I ran a “mutual funds” search. Early Saturday morning, I’d read a Wall Street Journal article about the “ostrich effect,” which quoted Vanguard as reporting that their mutual fund shareholders checked their account values far less often in June than they did in mid- to late 2007, when the market was up.

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