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(pictured: Peter Hele) NAB Asset Servicing has won the custodial services contract for specialist real estate investment manager APN Property Group for its suite of real estate securities funds, which total about $2.4 billion. The listed APN manages both A-REITs and direct property funds on behalf of both institutional and retail investors. Peter Hele, NAB Asset…

Robo-advice and blockchain innovations will out-disrupt peer-to-peer lending and crowd-funding platforms over the long term, a new global survey of CFA members has found. The survey of more than 3,800 CFA members worldwide found 40 per cent of respondents tipped robo-advice as having the most impact on financial services in five years time. A further…

(pictured: Cliff Asness) With the rise of factor investing and smart-beta strategies so, too, have come some new risks, such as the temptation to “factor time” and the increasing weight of money possibly leading to more market crashes. A new paper by Cliff Asness warns against “the siren song of factor timing”. Asness, a founder and…

(pictured: Rob Arnott)  Market conditions are such that, if there are lessons from the tech bubble period of 1998-99, investors should be cautiously rotating out of growth stocks, bonds and most developed markets in favour of value stocks, emerging markets, and real assets, according to Rob Arnott. The renowned value investor and founder of Research…

(pictured: Peter Alexander)  No Australian firms made it into the top 25 foreign asset managers making headway in mainland China, according to the latest rankings by Shanghai-based research firm Z-Ben Advisors. While big global firms tended to dominate, the report includes some surprises. A number of regional Asia firms scored higher than their total assets…

(pictured: Peter Brook and Paul Brody) By Trevor Dixon* Pillar Administration may be in the throes of being sold by the NSW Government, but that hasn’t stopped it from seeking to take advantage of what EY has described as the single-biggest technological breakthrough in transaction processing in 50 years. Eschewing the consultants’ more politically correct term…

(pictured: Guy Cameron) Investors are reigning in their exposure to high-yield bonds, according to Cameron Hume director Guy Cameron. But they don’t seem to be going out the risk curve in other areas of fixed income. Cameron Hume is an Edinburgh-based fixed income boutique set up in 2013 offering highly tailored portfolios taking positions in rates,…

(pictured: Andrea West) An array of industry heavyweights will attend the Chant West Super Fund Awards being held at Sydney’s Ivy Ballroom on May 4. The black-tie dinner will be directed this year by outgoing ASFA chief executive, Pauline Vamos. Andrea West, Chant West director, confirmed last week that all tickets had been sold to the…

(pictured: Anthony Quirk) Milford Asset Management has been formally removed from the New Zealand Superannuation Fund (NZS) roster in what has been billed as an amicable divorce. The news comes almost a year to the day since NZS suspended the NZ$281 million Milford NZ equities mandate in the wake of the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) investigation…

Russell Investments has cooked up a new hybrid model designed to burn-off carbon from global equities portfolios without contaminating underlying risk profiles. In a paper published last month – request paper here Russell laid out a proposal to help institutional equity investors comply with the United Nation-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) September 2014 Montréal Carbon…