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(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…

NSW Treasury Corporation, the largest not-for-profit fund in NSW and third-largest in Australia, has appointed Mercer Sentinel to advise on its securities servicing arrangements. It is arguably the biggest such tender ever in Australia. The $80 billion fund represents the backoffice amalgam for the old T-Corp, the former NSW Workcover insurance fund and the NSW…

(pictured: Peter Higgs) Tactical Global Management, the Australian-owned currency and global macro manager, which pioneered tactical asset allocation in the 1990s, has appointed a chief executive alongside executive chair Peter Higgs and is looking to redouble its marketing effort in macro-alpha strategies. Higgs, visiting Australia from his London base last week, said the firm, which has…

(pictured: David Orford and Stephen Mackley)  Financial Synergy has signed its largest-ever contract – a deal with Statewide Super – in what is also believed to be the super fund industry’s first ‘software as a managed service’ contract, for its Acurity admin system. According to Stephen Mackley, the system company’s chief executive, the deal is…

(pictured: Nigel Douglas) Global small caps tend to outperform large caps over most timeframes, but with slightly higher volatility, as most investors know. But for Australian investors, global small caps also have a distinct advantage over the domestic variety – they don’t have the same capacity problems A recent study by asset consultant Nigel Douglas, principal…

(pictured: Greg Goodsell)  Contrary to common belief, a new study has shown, listed infrastructure stocks do not necessarily behave like bonds all the time. You can still make money from them as global bond yields head north… eventually. The study, by 4 Dimensions Infrastructure, examines key aspects of the notion that listed infrastructure stocks are…

(pictured: Andrew Pickering) Australia’s ‘Mr Infrastructure’, Mike Fitzpatrick, and his colleagues at Infrastructure Capital Group, which they acquired from ANZ Bank just after the global financial crisis, have turned their eyes to Asia. With their latest raising they are garnering Asian investment into Australia. According to Andrew Pickering, ICG’s executive chairman and CIO, the investors, mostly…

(pictured: Ron Bird) Target-date funds, which proved popular in the US in recent years and are still being promoted in Australia, with mixed success, were roundly criticised by academics and some funds management practitioners at last week’s workshop organized by the Paul Woolley Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney. Professor Ron Bird, the former fund…