(Pictured:Â Andrea Slattery) Comment by Greg Bright SMSFs are much more skewed to small business ownership than previously thought. Their number will continue to rise for several years but their average balance will decline, indicating further disaggregation and diseconomies due to reduced scale. And they still hold way-too-much in cash and term deposits for their own…
(Pictured: Phil Gardner) Philip Gardner, the Australian head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM), has retired from the company. He will leave this Friday, take a holiday and consider various options. “I don’t have a plan,” he said last Friday. “I don’t even have a plan to make a plan.” He may stay within the…
(Pictured:Â Stephen Maloney) Ausbil Dexia has recruited its former asset servicing client servicing manager, Stephen Maloney, to sort out a technical problem to do with the fees charged on one of its funds. Maloney was made redundant, along with about a dozen others, by NAB Asset Servicing last year. He had worked with Ausbil Investment Management…
(Pictured:Â Alex Hutchison) Energy Industries Superannuation Scheme, the A$4.3 billion NSW-based fund, has changed asset servicing provider following a review. Northern Trust is replacing JP Morgan. The fund did a “detailed search and due diligence” under the supervision of chief executive Alex Hutchison and with the help of consultants. This is a relatively new trend whereby…
(Pictured:Â Graham Rich) America will either get us out of our malaise or not. China will either drag us back into problem territory or not. The yield play of the past six years may be over or not. It was difficult to get a handle on market trends at last week’s Portfolio Construction Summit. The toughest…
Damian Graham … ‘we needed to invest differently and think more about downside risk’ State Super Financial Services, which has more than $13 billion in funds under management on behalf of 175 financial planners and 55,000 clients, has continued to restructure its portfolios and adopted a new set of investment beliefs and planning philosophy. Greg…
By Nial Gooding* Buy low, sell high. Easy to say but hard, in the real world, to do. What if we sell high and things go higher? What if we buy low and things go lower? On the downside, though there comes a point where, if assets are real, companies are going concerns and profitability…
(Pictured:Â Christina Liosis) Christina Liosis, the former chief financial officer at Telstra Super, who oversaw the fund’s operational transition in securities services and member directed investment options, has joined systems provider FNZ. Liosis has become CFO for Australasia, based in Melbourne. FNZ has offices in New Zealand, where the company started, Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore in…
(Pictured:Â John Pickard) Martin Currie, the Edinburgh-based global equities manager, is now trading about 50 per cent of its assets through its new Asia Pacific hub in Singapore, which was opened as a full-service office in 2012. The office covers stock research, sales, client service and dealing across the region. About 16 per cent of the…
(Pictured:Â John Seo) John Seo likes his job because he feels like he is doing something worthwhile. He’s the world’s largest investor in catastrophe bonds. In the funds management industry we tend to focus on the demographic problem of ageing with respect to government funding and deficits into the future. Our old-age pension system and subsidized…
