Wealth management

The online investment firm Scottrade of St. Louis announced it is opening its second Fort Worth branch Nov. 24.

Country Club Bank in Prairie Village, Kan., is a $571 million-asset institution whose executives hope its wealth management expertise will soon be applied to billions of dollars of new assets.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. is offering a credit fund service for alternative fund managers that puts loan administration, fund administration, and investor services on one platform.

Money market fund inflows rose in the latest week, helping push the funds' total assets to another new record as yields continued to fall, according to iMoneyNet's Money Fund Report.

E-Trade Financial Corp. announced that it posted its best month in more than five years for new account openings in October, as trading activity climbed during the month and the slow-motion stock market crash swamped equity markets.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. has unveiled Global Trade Finance Solutions, an online platform tailored for corporate and bank users.

BlackRock Inc., the largest publicly traded U.S. asset manager, is cutting jobs for the first time in its 20-year history.

Northern Trust Global Investments launched an exchange-traded fund based on the FTSE CNBC Global 300 Index, its 17th ETF.

Franklin Templeton Investments Corp., a unit of Frank Resources Inc., has announced the start-up of the Franklin MENA Fund for Canadian investors.

T. Rowe Price Group Inc. has announced the opening of an investor center in Paramus, N.J.

Charles Schwab Corp. has announced the establishment of a business unit, Charles Schwab Institutional Services, to serve independent investment advisers, corporate benefit plan sponsors, and third-party retirement plan record keepers.

U.S. defined benefit pension plans lost a record $120 billion last month and are now underfunded, according to the actuarial and business consulting firm Milliman Inc.

Other fund companies are cutting staff to reduce expenses, Putnam Investments' chief executive said, but he is doing so to eliminate redundancies, improve performance, and hopefully stem the heavy outflows that have plagued the Boston subsidiary of Great West Lifeco Inc. for the past five years.

River Road Asset Management LLC of Louisville said it has exercised its option to purchase the 45% of its stock held by Fortis Bank SA.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said it has fined Citigroup Inc.'s global markets division $300,000 for not adequately supervising the commissions its brokers were charging on stock and option trades.

Faith-based funds are making leaps.

Hedge funds lost an average of 5.52% last month, according to data released by Hennessee Group LLC.

Rydex Investments announced that its Russian currency-based exchange-traded fund has begun trading last week on the NYSE Arca exchange.

According the Bureau for Labor Statistics, 10.1 million Americans were unemployed as of October. As reported last month, the number of long-term unemployed — those jobless for 27 weeks or more — rose by 249,000, to 2.3 million. In the New York metropolitan market, thousands lost their jobs in just the months of September and October.