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(Pictured: Charles Wu) by Greg Bright Media Super has lost its last professional investment manager, Charles Wu, and has advertised for a replacement. The troubled fund, which is known to have been canvassing merger possibilities, last year made its CIO position, then held by Dr Jon Glass, redundant. Wu, a former asset consultant at Mercer, was…

(Pictured: Ian Dunbar) Sophisticated investors aged 60 and over are among the fastest growing adopters of ‘robo’ advice globally and Australia’s self-managed superannuation fund market will be the next frontier for automated advice of various types, according to a report by financial services consultancy FinDigital and robo advice newcomer Ignition Wealth. The ‘2015 Automated Investment Advisors…

(Pictured: Stephen Karrasch) by Greg Bright Findex Group, which now has $15 billion under management and administration from the retail sector, has recruited two big names to oversee its investments, following the insourcing of advice and admin from Philo Capital. Philo’s Stephen Karrasch has landed at Aurora Funds as the new head of distribution. It’s an…

(Pictured: Jeffrey Levi) Listed fund management companies delivered an average of 33 per cent profit margin in 2014, the highest in five years, on revenue growth of 13 per cent, accord to a study by Casey Quirk & Associates. Australia’s seven listed firms outperformed all others in terms of revenue growth, with an average of 25…

(Pictured: Fiona Mackenzie) by David Chaplin The New Zealand Superannuation Fund (NZS) will be managing close to NZ$850 million (A$845 million) of local equities in-house after suspending one of its two remaining external managers in the asset class last week. In a highly unusual move, NZS pulled a NZ$281 million active New Zealand shares mandate from…

(Pictured: Raewyn Williams) Parametric Portfolio Associates has produced a new white paper – ‘Where Passive Falls Short’ – as a precursor to the firm’s launch of a range of tax-efficient smart beta strategies in Australia. A momentum-tilted tax-managed portfolio would have outperformed the ASX 200 after-tax by 56 basis points a year for 10 years. The…

(Pictured: Scarlett Dorney and Daphne van der Oord flank Marcus Christoe)  Women in ETFs (WE), an international association formed last year in the US, has started an Asia Pacific chapter with an active Australian group. The group held its first Australian event last month and rang the bell to open trading on the ASX on…

(Pictured: David Eiswert) David Eiswert makes his living by asking the question of himself and his fellow portfolio managers at T. Rowe Price: ‘will what has made an investment a good one in the past continue to make it so in the future?’ When he and his colleagues ask the same question at a macro level,…

(Pictured: Richard Pzena) by Barrie Dunstan Pzena Investment Management, New York-based deep value investor, is still finding opportunities for its style of investing in current markets with a tilt to European markets, a selective over-weight stake in big oil groups and US financials – and a recent sortie into Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Richard Pzena, founder…

There appears to be a disconnect between big investor expectations and their fund manager realities in the incorporation of ESG issues in decision-making, according to the latest Mercer survey. The survey was sponsored by a global alternatives manager, LGT Capital, and includes interesting views on ESG in alternatives. Mercer has been at the forefront of…