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(Pictured: William Priest) Last year was a record, of sorts, for share buybacks and other capital restructurings in the US. Fund managers who focus on company cashflows and what is done with them to deliver shareholder returns did very well. It’s not only about the increased flexibility cash delivers a company through the safety of liquidity,…

(Pictured: Salvador Saiz) Financial advice is the most important service that super funds can provide their members in the run-up to retirement, according to a survey of members of all types of funds. Only 13 per cent of those currently using an adviser do so from one inside their fund. The survey of 997 members aged…

David Braga … ‘I don’t think we’re at the end of the regulatory change program’ The Australian Custodial Services Association, which turns 20 years old this year, is a body whose importance in the superannuation and funds management industries has soared since the global financial crisis. It is also the only organisation of its type…

(Pictured: 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: 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: 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: 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…