It is clear that COVID-19 will have a lasting impact on the way that all businesses, including funds management and wealth management, will operate beyond when, hopefully soon, the pandemic has abated. One of the impacts will be to accelerate the use of digital services. A new white paper, by digital player Infosys, has outlined…
Big investors seem reasonably sanguine about both their performance during the current market volatility and the outlook for markets generally over the next few months, according to a report by global manager search firm and investment advisor bfinance. The report was based on a survey, in June, of 368 of the largest pension funds in…
Investment organisations are not learning from their experience when it comes to improving investment committee (IC) practices and governance, according to new research from the ‘Thinking Ahead Institute’, a not-for-profit member group linked to Willis Towers Watson. The research, ‘Going from Good to Great‘, identifies the aircraft industry’s structured-learning environments as one for pension funds…
Two studies published in the past month have shed light on both the latest rankings, by assets, and how Sovereign Wealth Funds are investing those assets. Unlike many big pension funds, there is a big disparity in the cultures of sovereign funds and their investment styles. The definition of ‘sovereign wealth fund’ could also be…
Around every corner of Australia’s roughly $3 trillion in super industry assets, you’ll find a forecaster, says one of the industry’s leading researchers, Raewyn Williams. Investment teams forecast market direction, engagement teams forecast new member flows and finance teams forecast what seem to be the regulators’ favourite topic: fund fees and other costs. “But where…
by David Chaplin Fintech enthusiasts have until this week to lob in an offer for the Australian and New Zealand arms of collapsed German online payments firm Wirecard. The company has been labelled the biggest failure for investors’ due diligence in recent memory, according to global due diligence specialist Castle Hall. It has the dubious…
Constructing a diversified portfolio of different managers and strategies requires an understanding of how each relates to the others in different market conditions. Strategies which cluster together, in terms of having a positive correlation, should receive a smaller allocation in a diversified portfolio than those which don’t cluster. Those which help diversification should be allocated…
Most investment firms seem to have transitioned fairly smoothly to working from home compared with a lot of other industries, and that goes for big asset consulting firms around the world as well as managers. But the consultants, like managers, have new problems to try to solve. Frontier Advisors and its two global research partners…
Until a few years’ ago, multi-asset managers were consistently delivering reliable returns with good downside awareness. However, from 2018 there was a noticeable shift towards persistent underperformance in relative-value multi-asset managers which was outside the range of expectations. Frontier Advisors has produced a paper analysing the shift in performance, underlying drivers and the way forward….
In times of crisis, robust fund governance is vital, according to Sarah Cornelius, a Frontier Advisors consultant. She quizzed two fiduciary investors and another Frontier consultant on governance issues during one of last week’s sessions at the annual Frontier conference (on July 21), held virtually over three weeks this year. They discussed the impact of…
