Our Authors

(Pictured: Greg O’Neill) La Trobe Financial has negotiated a partnership for its annual CIO and COO Awards with the Fund Executives Association Ltd (FEAL), also agreeing to sponsor the Awards for the next three years. The two Awards, which each carries a $10,000 prize, will be next announced at a standalone ceremony on November 11 in…

(Pictured: Mike Mendelson) AQR Capital Management has come out in support of the often-maligned ‘high frequency trading’ because of the liquidity, and therefore additional efficiency, it provides to markets. The interesting thing is that AQR is not a provider of HFT strategies – simply a well-informed user of markets. Michael Mendelson, a principal at AQR who…

(Pictured: Cliff Asness) by Greg Bright The people who run AQR Capital Management are not the types who let sleeping dogs lay. They are happy, even, to broach confronting subjects at their celebratory 10th anniversary Australian seminar, held in Sydney last week. For the uninitiated, Michael Lewis is the celebrated American writer of various finance-oriented best…

(Pictured: Patrick Noble) Zurich Financial Services Australia has secured a model portfolio inclusion from a major institutionally owned dealer group, with its global share fund. The fund searches for earnings a little differently to those of other managers. Rather than following investment norms by focusing on the overall level and duration of a stock’s earnings growth,…

(Pictured: Gorky Urquieta) by Penny Pryor There are still opportunities in both emerging market debt and emerging market equities according to portfolio managers at global fund manager Neuberger Berman. In Australia recently to meet with clients, co-head of emerging markets debt, Gorky Urquieta, said that the team did not really subscribe to the view that there…

(Pictured: Paul Costello) Paul Costello, the founding chief executive of the Future Fund, has joined the board of Qantas Super, taking the spot vacated by Australia’s new Governor General, and knight, Sir Peter Cosgrove. In a perhaps-unavoidable understatement, Anne Ward, Qantas Super’s chair, said: “Paul brings a wealth of experience in investments, governance, operations and superannuation…

Andrew Proebstl… ‘I think there’s too much negativity surrounding SMSFs.’ If there’s one super fund that knows a thing or two about mergers, it’s legalsuper, a product of seven mergers inside as many years over the last decade. The chief executive, Andrew Proebstl, has been involved in all of them. He spoke with Greg Bright about…

(Pictured: Daphne van der Oord) S&P Dow Jones Indices (SPDJI) aims to increase its presence in the institutional index space as it builds out its Australian team under the leadership of recent hire Daphne van der Oord. “Given the partnership that we have with the ASX, a big portion of my role will be to ensure…

(Pictured: Bernard Reilly) Bernard Reilly has left State Street Global Advisors, where he was most recently global head of strategy and an executive vice president, after 24 years with the firm, the last nine of which were internationally focused. He decided, he said last week, that, with two teenage boys, he wanted to spend most of…

(Pictured: Andrew Boal) Independence of trustee board directors and how to deal with members’ longevity risk are two of the biggest concerns of superannuation funds, according to Towers Watson Australia managing director, Andrew Boal. To deal with the first, Boal recently released a paper that concluded there isn’t enough to support the compulsory appointment of independent…