Just as living benefits helped drive broker-dealers' variable annuity feeding frenzy years ago, these guaranteed features appear to be propelling firms' sales of indexed annuities.
Broker-dealers and wirehouses have taken a particular shine to indexed annuities, seeing them as a fixed-income alternative that can provide better growth than a CD. They're an attractive product, considering that low interest rates have made many other fixed-income alternatives less promising.
A quick lesson on these products: Indexed annuities credit clients' accounts with a minimum guaranteed rate of interest. They also credit an interest rate that's tied to movement within an index. Accountholders don't capture the full amount of the index's performance, as carriers place limits on clients' participation in the index and can cap the return.
Top 5 China Stocks To Own Right Now: iShares PHLX SOX Semiconductor Sector Index Fund (SOXX)
iShares S&P North American Technology-Semiconductors Index Fund (the Fund), formerly iShares S&P GSTI Semiconductor Index Fund, seeks investment results that correspond to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, as represented by the S&P North American Technology-Semiconductors Index. The Fund invests in a representative sample of securities included in the Index that collectively has an investment profile similar to the Index.
The Index has been developed as an equity benchmark for United States-traded semiconductor stocks. The Index includes companies that are producers of capital equipment or manufacturers of wafers and chips.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Udovich]
There appears to be light at the end of the tunnel for mid cap fabless semiconductor stock Marvell Technology Group Ltd (NASDAQ: MRVL) despite the fact that the company has lost a patent infringement battle with Carnegie Mellon University that could cost it $1.54 billion, meaning its worth taking a closer look at the stock along with the performance of semiconductor ETF benchmarks like SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF (NYSEARCA: XSD), iShares PHLX SOX Semiconductor Sector (NASDAQ: SOXX) and Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares (NYSEARCA: SOXL).
- [By John Udovich]
On Thursday after the market closed, mid cap fabless semiconductor stock Marvell Technology Group Ltd (NASDAQ: MRVL) reported earnings and was slipping in after hours trading, meaning its worth taking a closer look at those earnings along with the performance of potential semiconductor benchmarks like the SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF (NYSEARCA: XSD), iShares PHLX SOX Semiconductor Sector (NASDAQ: SOXX) and Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares (NYSEARCA: SOXL). In case you aren�� familiar with the term fabless semiconductor, it�� a�business�model that involves the�outsourcing the manufacturing of silicon wafers.�Most semiconductor companies are actually fabless because of the high cost of building�a facility and manufacturing fab. Therefore, fabless semiconductor companies can�concentrate on the design and marketing of chips while outsourcing the actual production to larger foundry companies.
Hot Promising Companies To Invest In 2014: Centrex Metals Ltd (CXM)
Centrex Metals Limited (Centrex) is an Australia-based company engaged in iron ore exploration on wholly owned tenements in conjunction with joint venture partners Wuhan Iron & Steel (Group) Co. (WISCO) and Baotou Iron & Steel (Group) Co. (Baotou). The Company�� principal projects include WISCO joint ventures (Eyre Iron: Centrex 40%, Port Spencer: Centrex 50%), Bungalow joint venture (Centrex 70%), Wilgerup (Centrex 100%) and Exploration (Centrex 100%). The Bungalow / Minbrie magnetite deposit is located 9 kilometers north of the coastal town of Cowell on the Eyre Peninsula and around 100 kilometers from the Port Spencer joint venture site. The Goulburn and Archer tenements cover an extensive area with a number of base metal, gold and iron deposits and occurrences. Advisors' Opinion:- [By James E. Brumley]
Call it a hunch (because that's all it is), but I think Cardium Therapeutics Inc. (NYSEMKT:CXM) at least belongs on your watchlist, if not already in your portfolio. CXM shares have dropped a handful of key hints that say the bulls are just one good nudge away from catapulting this stock upward.
Hot Promising Companies To Invest In 2014: Rally Software Development Corp (RALY)
Rally Software Development Corp., incorporated on July 12, 2001, is a global provider of cloud-based solutions for managing Agile software development. The Company's platform transforms the way organizations manage the software development lifecycle by enabling close alignment of software development and strategic business objectives, facilitating collaboration, increasing transparency, and automating manual processes. Organizations use its solutions to accelerate the pace of innovation, improve productivity and more effectively adapt to rapidly-changing customer needs and competitive dynamics. Its enterprise-class platform is extensible, cost-effective and designed to be easy to use. Agile is a software development methodology characterized by short, iterative and adaptable development cycles.
The Company provides a common platform on which organizations can collaborate across globally-distributed software development teams, solicit ideas and feedback from customers, and gain transparency into Agile software development projects. Its solutions automate and optimize activities such as project planning and scheduling, resource allocation and reporting on progress and cost, enabling users to manage the entire Agile software development lifecycle. Its cloud-based platform of management solutions is designed to address the application lifecycle market, which IDC defines as comprising the software configuration management, information technology (IT) project and portfolio management, and automated software markets.
Agile Management Solutions
It offers Agile management solutions that its customers use for planning, collaborating, tracking and reporting on the creation of new software products and applications. Its solutions support the full software development lifecycle with key capabilities that include Idea Management, Agile Portfolio Management, Time and Cost Management, Agile Project Management, Requirements Management and Quality Management. Its Idea Management c! apability, Rally Idea Manager, is used by its customers to engage with their end users to solicit ideas for products and manage feedback on proposed features and enhancements. This capability establishes a communication channel between its customers and their end-users. Teams and organizations use this capability to engage directly with end-users in an online community, collect information to assess customer needs and automatically communicate development status to end-users.
Its Agile Portfolio Management capability, Rally Portfolio Manager, bridges the gap between business leaders and development teams. Business leaders are provided up-to-date and accurate information on the status of key projects while development teams are provided clear visibility into the priorities of the business in order to better align their feature backlogs. Our Time and Cost Management capability, Rally Time Tracker, enables key financial functions related to software development, such as software capitalization, cost tracking, budget management and billing. This capability reduces double entry in other systems and ensures data is captured and aggregated into reports. Teams and organizations use this capability to reduce daily overhead of tracking time by integrating into the daily process, design and generate aggregate timesheets to meet accounting, budgeting or billing requirements , ensure that time entries meet audit and compliance requirements and integrate time tracking information into existing back office and time and attendance applications.
Its Agile Project Management capability allows cross-functional teams to efficiently plan and manage software releases. Teams and organizations use this capability to manage product and release backlogs that reflect the priorities of the business, schedule all or parts of requirements from backlogs into releases based on capacity and real-time visibility into the status of features, priorities, roadblocks and risks. Its Requirements Management capabil! ity enabl! es business leaders and analysts to centrally manage and prioritize features for development. Users can elaborate requirements with needed details, break them up into smaller units and organize them to match the changing structures of their teams or technology components. Its Quality Management capability, Rally Quality Manager, enables testing engineers to integrate testing into the development process from the beginning of a project. This capability provides a full enterprise solution to plan and track the execution of test activities.
Platform Capabilities
Its platform employs a analytics and reporting engine. In addition to over 25 pre-built standard reports, its platform includes a custom reporting engine that allows customers to create reports to meet their needs. Its platform also includes dashboard technology to present personalized content and then share that content for consistent use across a team or organization. Its platform provides enterprise-class security capabilities simplifying the administration of thousands of users. It can integrate its platform with its customers' existing security infrastructure to provide end-users with the ability to have single-sign-on (SSO) and provide advanced security measures to reduce risk and meet the needs of enterprises. This adaptability also ensures its solutions can be configured to meet the changing needs of an organization. It offers an open Web services application programming interface (WSAPI) providing full read-write access to all of the data within its platform. The WSAPI is versioned so that integrations or customizations are insulated from changes in the WSAPI, thereby preserving a customer's investment in custom functionality.
It provides customization services that produce Apps for specific customer needs. Examples of Apps that are available in its catalog include Dependency Status Dashboard enables organizations to view dependencies between teams and forecast potential impediments and stoppages in ! a project! ; System Requirement Validation Document generates a document for signature and archival typically used by customers in regulated industries to validate that the requirements of a system or application have been met; Agile Earned-Value Management provides a report based on traditional project management practices that provides what-if scenarios for planning scope, schedule and budget, and There are over 40 integrations available for its platform. It has 25 pre-built integrations with complementary products that synchronize their data with its platform. Additionally, there are over 20 integrations that third parties have created with its platform that they offer to their customers. It also integrates with open-source development tools, including Subversion, Jenkins and Eclipse, as well as commercial products, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Studio and HP QualityCenter.
Editions
It offers four editions of its Agile management solution. Each edition is built on the same software code base. Rally Community Edition is designed for an individual team that operates independently, even if it is part of a larger organization. Community Edition includes a basic version of Agile Project Management and Requirements Management capabilities and is available for free for 10 users and one project.
Rally eXpress Edition is designed for both and small organizations and scales from a single team to multiple, independent teams and projects. eXpress Edition includes a basic version of Agile Project Management and Requirements Management capabilities. eXpress Edition supports unlimited users and projects.
Rally Enterprise Edition is targeted at medium to organizations focused on coordinating projects across multiple teams. Enterprise Edition includes Agile Project Management, Requirements Management and basic Quality Management capabilities. Enterprise Edition supports unlimited users and projects.
Rally Unlimited Edition is built for organizations and ! offers it! s full set of capabilities for managing the entire software lifecycle, including Idea Management, Agile Portfolio Management, Time and Cost Management, Agile Project Management, Requirements Management and Quality Management. Unlimited Edition supports unlimited users and projects.
On-Premise Deployment Option
A small percentage of its customers deploy its solutions on-premise. When its software is installed at the customer site, it specifies the hardware requirements and deliver its solutions on a virtual software appliance.
Professional Services
It offers a broad array of professional services to its customers to assist them in the implementation of its platform and adoption of Agile techniques.It offers its services globally. It offer public and private courses educating customers on Agile practices. A number of its training courses are certified by the independent organization Scrum Alliance. Through its Agile University brand, it offers Agile-related education and coursework taught by its consultants and a network of instructors. It offers a broad set of services that help customers implement Agile practices across their organization. It aims to make organizations self-sufficient so they can continue expanding their usage of Agile after it concludes its services engagement. Its implementation services combine workshops and training to help organizations incorporate its platform into their development process. These services include process training and product customization to help organizations take advantage of the full breadth of capabilities its platform offers. Customers can elect to leverage its platform extension services to customize its platform to meet the specific needs of their organization. It creates custom Apps and customized integrations to ensure that its solutions fit a customer's infrastructure and practices, and it offers data migration services to migrate data from a customer's legacy application into its platform.
The ! Company competes with Atlassian, CollabNet, VersionOne, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Udovich]
Small cap cloud and enterprise services stock Rally Software Development Corp (NYSE: RALY) just had a reversal ��meaning its worth taking a closer look at the stock along with potential performance benchmarks like Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL), iShares North American Tech-Software (NYSEARCA: IGV) and First Trust ISE Cloud Computing Index (NASDAQ: SKYY).
- [By Evan Niu, CFA]
What: Shares of Rally Software (NYSE: RALY ) rallied today by as much as 20% after the company announced fiscal first quarter results.
Hot Promising Companies To Invest In 2014: Nuveen Floating Rate Income Fund (JFR)
Nuveen Floating Rate Income Fund is a closed-end management investment company. The Fund invests primarily in senior loans whose interest rates float or adjust periodically based on a benchmark interest rate index. Under normal market circumstances, the Fund will invest at least 80% of its managed assets in adjustable rate secured senior loans and adjustable rate unsecured senior loans, which unsecured senior loans will be, at the time of investment, investment grade quality. In addition, at least 65% of the Funds assets will be invested in senior loans that are secured by claims on specific collateral. Nuveen Asset Management is the advisor of the Fund. The sectors covered by the portfolio include media, hotels, restaurants and leisure, healthcare providers and service, chemicals, United States of America, containers/packaging and other.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Dowdee]
The following 10 funds satisfied all of these conditions:
BlackRock Float Rate Strategies (FRA). This CEF sells at a discount of 3%, which is low compared to an average premium of 2% over the past year. The distribution has been managed at 6.1% and a small amount (less than 10%) has been return of capital (ROC). However, this has not negatively affected net asset value (NAV) so has not been destructive. The fund holds 447 securities, with 90% in floating rate loans. FRA utilizes 27% leverage and has an expense ratio of 1.7%, including interest payments. Eaton Vance Floating Rate (EFR). This CEF sells at a 1% premium, which is low compared to an average premium of 5% over the past year. The distribution is 6.2%, none of which was ROC. The fund holds 800 securities, with 90% in floating rate loans. About 85% of the securities are from U.S. companies. EFR utilizes 35% leverage and has an expense ratio of 1.8% including interest payments. ING Prime Rate Trust (PPR). This CEF sells for a premium of 2%, which is below the average premium of 5%. It has a distribution of 6.8%, none of which was ROC. The fund has 350 holdings, virtually all in senior loans and from US companies. PPR utilizes 29% leverage and has a high expense ratio of 2.1%, including interest payments. Invesco VK Dynamic Credit Opportunities (VTA). This CEF sells for a discount of 5%, which is below the average discount of 1%. It has a distribution of 7.1%, none of which was ROC. The fund has 495 holdings, with 76% in floating rate loans. About 25% of the loans are from non-US companies. VTA utilizes a relatively low 20% leverage but still has a high expense ratio of 2.1%, including interest payments. Invesco VK Senior Income (VVR). This CEF sells for a discount of 1%, which is below the average premium of 3%. It has a distribution of 7.1%, none of which was ROC. The fund has over 500 holdings, with 89% in floating rate loans. Almost all (95%) securities are from US companies. VVR ut
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