Products January 14, 2009

Fidelity Site Launches Stock Research Tools for Investors

Fidelity Investments today announced the launch of three free capabilities to its stock research platform to help investors generate ideas and make more informed investment decisions, the company said.
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According to a press release, Fidelity’s new offerings, available on Fidelity.com, include:

  • Explore and Rank Research Firms: Investors can learn more about the methodologies, approaches, and equity styles of 19 well-known equity research providers and view scorecards that rank 10 independent analyst firms on multiple dimensions of performance based on their past buy/sell recommendations.
  • Portfolio-Level Backtesting: Fidelity has expanded its backtesting offering to allow Fidelity customers to do full portfolio-level backtesting of strategies on the equities listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (DJI), the NASDAQ-100 Index (NDX), or the S&P 100 Index (OEX).
  • Markets & Sectors: Fidelity has redesigned and enhanced its Markets & Sectors research. Information has been organized to provide updates on the Equity, Interest Rates, Foreign Exchanges, and Energy, Metals & Agriculture markets. In addition, there are now top headlines and research reports covering U.S. and World Indexes; sector news, analysis, and research; as well as news, research, and Fidelity commentary about the economy.

“We believe that as investors experiment with these research tools, they’ll have opportunities to uncover investment and trading ideas in new markets, sectors and stocks that they hadn’t considered before,” said James Burton, president of Fidelity’s retail brokerage business, in the release.

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Data & Research January 14, 2009

HNW Retirees Keep Advisers at Retirement

Less than a third of surveyed high-net-worth retirees said they changed advisers at the time of their retirement, according to a study commissioned by Securian Financial Group.
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The survey, conducted by SpectremGroup, also found that less than 10% of surveyed retirees said they will change advisers in the future.

Nearly 90% are comfortable their retirement savings will be adequate for their retirement years, according to the study. Those who are older show a higher level of confidence. (It should be noted that the survey was conducted in August.)

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HNW Retiree Spending

High-net-worth retirees actually spend more on income taxes than on health care, according to a release of survey results.

The survey found that income tax is the highest average annual expense by a large margin for the respondents—an average of $25,226. Once real estate, capital gains, and personal property tax are added in, the total average annual tax expense was $40,578, or about 4% of the respondents’ net worth, according to the release.

Securian said the survey also found that the respondents’ concerns about health care issues outstripped their actual health-care outlays. Nearly one-third of respondents said before they retired that health care would be their largest expenditure. However, in retirement, health care was actually only 12% of their expenses with an annual average of $6,681.

More money was spent on travel, cars, charity, real estate taxes, food, gifts, and mortgages, the survey found.

The poll found the bulk of current retirees’ income comes from Social Security (96%) and pension plan distributions (60%).

Spectrem surveyed 225 retirees between the ages of 70 세 and 75. The respondents had a net worth of at least $1 million.

More survey results are available here.


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