With complaints about its efficacy still reverberating through the super industry, the YFYS performance test is to be extended next year to cover certain member investment options. Sustainability will be a big loser. Having delivered its first-year test results last month (August 31), the Treasury-instigated APRA-implemented test for big super funds found that the MySuper…
Pinnacle Investment Management has acquired the third-party marketing business Winston Capital Partners, primarily so it can control distribution for one of its affiliates, Coolabah Capital Investments. Coolabah, a $7 billion fixed income credit manager, has had a run of success in the past couple of years, with Pinnacle recently increasing its minority shareholding to 32…
Last year a big super fund, Aware Super, shocked the M&A market in Australia with a surprise bid for a listed company, OptiComm. It signalled a new era in competition among players at the big end of town. It was the first time a super fund had tried to buy a whole listed company in…
It’s not just about the higher yields, although that helps. It’s also about the correlation between hard and local currencies. And Australian investors are in pole position. In a series of discussions with the firm’s Australian investors and others recently (August 23 – September 3), Grant Webster, head of Ninety One’s emerging markets ‘blended debt’…
The 10th annual Zenith Investment Partners funds management awards will be live streamed this year, on October 15, with the list of 22 awards having been fine-tuned for the occasion. A new award has been added – global small-cap equities – but two previously separate awards – Best Exchange Traded Fund and Best Listed Investment…
PIMCO, the world’s largest fixed income manager, believes that there is more risk in the current inflation bogey than the market is anticipating. It has published what is likely the most authoritative look at the current inflation concerns and suggested what investors should be doing about them. The PIMCO paper, ‘Assessing Inflation: Theories, Policies and…
bfinance, the global fund-manager search and research consultant, is moving into the wholesale wealth management sector, having completed its first global survey in the space. The survey of 120 wealth managers, including about 10 from Australia, shows a pattern of trends which are similar to those in the institutional market where bfinance has focused its…
The last of the independently owned asset servicing firms, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co, has succumbed to persistent overtures and will be acquired by State Street for US$3.5 billion. The deal announced last week (September 7), will undoubtedly reignite State Street’s own rumours of the past 18 months about a separation of its increasingly successful…
The 88,000 members of Australian Catholic Superannuation and Retirement Fund (ACSRF) are about to be very confused. As are members of some other big super funds. Forty-year-old members in ACSRF’s default MySuper product, LifetimeOne, will be told they just earned an average 20.9 per cent from their super (after fees and taxes for the year…
Supported by record retail inflows, ESG-focused investing has, finally, become ‘the norm’, according to panelists at least two of the sessions at last week’s (August 31-September 2) AIST ASI conference. But one of the interesting, most recent, trends within this trend, is how climate change action and inaction has given a very short-term focus to…
