Captrust Financial Advisors, a Raleigh-based investment firm, has opened an office in Des Moines, continuing its expansion into new markets.

The company, which advises companies on investing their employees' retirement savings and also works with individual investors, now has offices in 14 states. Captrust also opened offices in Dallas and Orlando, Fla., this year.

The firm also announced a partnership with Holmes Murphy & Associates, a benefits and insurance consulting firm with offices mostly in the Midwest.

Captrust bought the new Des Moines office from Holmes Murphy. Former Holmes Murphy advisors will run the new office: Jim Pierce, Jean Duffy, Andrew Shimp, and Jen Eddleman.

Captrust has about 160 employees, including 115 at its headquarters, a 17-story building that bears the company's name at the North Hills shopping center in North Raleigh.

The total amount of money in North Carolina's college-savings plan this week passed half a billion dollars for the first time.

The recent stock-market rebound and renewed interest in saving money during the recession are spurring more people to invest in the state's 529 plan. The total invested and number of accounts are up about 20 percent in the past year.

Cree might get additional financial assistance from the state as it continues adding new jobs and expanding its Durham manufacturing plant.

But it recently received a bigger pot of money to pay for expansion, thanks to investor optimism about Cree's prospects. The company's stock has more than doubled this year as Wall Street bets that Cree will benefit from increasing demand for energy efficient LED lighting.

Bolstered by the stock's surge, Cree last month sold nearly $400 million worth of new shares and earmarked about $150 million of that money for capital expenditures.

"Business is very good for Cree and they're struggling to add capacity," said Harsh Kumar, an analyst with Morgan Keegan & Co. "As the federal stimulus money is kicking in, as the population is becoming more green, LED lighting is a very compelling product."

Later today, Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda and Gov. Beverly Perdue are scheduled to announce "new green jobs in North Carolina" at Cree's Durham headquarters. Perdue's presence suggests that Cree could get more state aid.

Even as it gobbles up failed banks to expand its lending business, Raleigh-based First Citizens Bank is shedding another subsidiary.

The bank has agreed to sell its bond-trustee division to U.S. Bank of Minneapolis. The division helps municipalities, universities and corporations sell bonds, and protects the interest of bondholders.

Terms of the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the year, weren't disclosed.

First Citizens is selling the division to focus on other parts of its institutional investor business, including asset management and retirement plans, said Gene Lewis, a First Citizens' senior vice president.

In recent months, First Citizens has bought two troubled West Coast banks in deals orchestrated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. First Citizens now has about 430 branches.

U.S. Bank is a division of U.S. Bancorp and has more than 2,800 branches.

The stock-picking pros who run the Oak Value Fund out of Chapel Hill got a nice plug in the latest issue of Barron's.

The profile emphasizes how the team led by three co-managers -- Larry Coats, David Carr and Christy Phillips -- spends a great amount of time "fishing" for the right publicly traded companies to find the best values. The story points out that the strategy has paid off, with Oak Value up 19 percent this year. That's better than its peer group of mutual funds.

The Barron's story returns several times to the fishing metaphor (headline: "Angling for Returns"), and mentions that Coats is an avid fisherman. The magazine even ran a photo of Coats casting in a bucolic stream.

One minor issue: Coats is an avid salt-water fly fisherman who usually fishes at the coast. But Barron's "was too cheap to send a photographer all the way down there," Coats said in a phone interview this week. "They asked me if we could find water closer, so we shot over by Jordan Lake."

Shah Capital Management, a Raleigh-based investment firm with $250 million under management, is making a big bet on surging consumer demand in China.

The firm spent $12 million to buy a 14 percent stake in Symphony Holdings, a Hong Kong company that markets and licenses sports and apparel brand names such as Puma, Haggar and Speedo.

The move makes Shah the largest institutional investor in Symphony.

The financial turmoil that keeps claiming victims on Wall Street has created an opening for Raleigh-based Red Hat.

The software maker will replace floundering CIT Group in the iconic Standard & Poor’s 500 Index next week. In addition to the cachet the move gives Red Hat, Companies added to the S&P 500 typically rally as investors who track the index buy shares.