JANA Investment Advisers, Australia’s largest asset consulting firm, is expanding its insurance business, which until now has been most developed in the health insurance sector, with the creation of a new role as ‘head of insurance strategy’, to be filled by Greg Wilkinson. Wilkinson, currently a senior consultant and a member of JANA’s global equities…
Financial advisers around the world are rightly concerned about the state of markets, with record-high prices for both equities and bonds. As previously reported, according to an Investment Trends survey of Australian investors, there has been a jump in the frequency of communications between advisers and their clients in Australia since COVID-19 hit home in…
by Greg Bright* There aren’t too many things you could buy in the investment world, be they businesses or hard assets, that will fall in value by nearly three-quarters over a period of more than 20 years. But NAB’s sale of MLC to IOOF reflects one. With some related transactions, such as buying the AVIVA…
Chant West Holdings shareholders, in the company now known as Consolidated Financial Holdings, approved with an almost unanimous vote, a return of capital recently (August 31). Until last month the listed company owned two businesses – Chant West and Enzumo. They were both sold in June this year. While the publicly available figures from the…
The gender pay gap is an age-old story. It’s one where the efforts of some well-meaning legislators and labour organisations have made only incremental gains over decades and which has just taken a big turn for the worse due to COVID-19. And the way forward when the repercussions of the pandemic have eventually subsided, doesn’t…
Towards the end of the annual Women in Super Summit, which was this year open to the whole industry rather than only members, it was clear that the already-poor position women have faced with their super compared with men is getting worse in the current economic and medical crisis. Government policy and party politics are…
With engagement between their fund managers – either internal or external – and investee companies increasingly being demanded by institutional investors, new complexities are emerging in the study of ESG principles and practice. The evolution of ESG investing is picking up speed. While they are interlinked, there is a lot more work going into the…
While most ESG strategies across the range of institutional, wholesale and retail investors remain active, over the past three years that has been rapid growth in passive ESG-influenced funds, both in their number and assets, according to Morningstar. Europe remains the biggest such market but the US, historically slow to adopt ESG funds, has grown…
Metrics takes out top award among alternative managers
A clear correlation has emerged between risk appetite during the COVID-19 pandemic and the age of investors, with Australian ‘millennials’ – the cohort aged 24-39 – among the most proactive globally, according to a survey of 1,800 people in six countries. Australian investors of all ages are also among the most bullish globally. The survey…
