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(Pictured: Paul Hennessy) After a long history in Australia via partnerships with other managers, the Capital Group has embarked on a program to control its own destiny. It is recruiting a head of retail and several other senior staff after taking back retail distribution from the multi-affiliate manager Pinnacle Investment Management. Capital appointed its first Australian-based…

(Pictured: Seth Merrin) Liquidnet, the global off-market trading network for asset managers, is looking to emulate its coverage of the listed space my moving into unlisted transactions. Headline-grabbing IPOs mask the fact that private companies are staying private longer. On a visit to Australia last week, Seth Merrin, Liquidnet’s founder, said there are only about half…

(Pictured: Ian Robertson) Ian Robertson, the secretary of the depa trade union and former chair of AIST, has resigned his long-standing position on the board of NSW’s Local Government Super, where he was also chair of its investment committee. The union has nominated Joanna Davison, former funds manager, as his replacement. This is how he announced…

Comment by John Schaffer* On October 14, Investor Strategy News published an article entitled: “What value is manager research and selection?”  Whilst the article purported to have an even-handed expose of views on the subject, it could easily have left one with the impression that manager research doesn’t add value, that we are unable to…

(Pictured: Marianne Brown) Trading in OTC derivatives in the US has become as close to real time as is technologically possible, thanks largely to regulation from the Federal Trade Commission. According to Omgeo, there will be a domino effect in other markets and instruments. Omgeo’s president and CEO, Marianne Brown, was in Australia last week as…

(Pictured: Damian Hill) REST Super won the Super Fund of the Year Award plus the Pension of the Year Award at the SuperRatings annual event last week. But Damian Hill, REST’s chief executive, predicted the pensions category would change dramatically in the future. Hill said that pension products represented the biggest challenge for super funds and…

(Pictured: Paul Woolley) There is no evidence that today’s finance industry is more efficient than it was in the 1960s, the annual conference of the Paul Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality was told last week. Professor Thomas Phillippon, of New York University, said that unit costs associated with the industry were higher…

A global survey of hedge fund managers reveals they are making significant investments in their firms’ infrastructure to comply with new regulations. The managers in the US pay the most and managers in Asia pay the least. The survey results say smaller fund managers are paying on average US$700,000 a year, medium-sized manager US$6 million…

Michael Block and entourage at a function in PNG After running the investments for some big Australian funds – a university endowment, a government insurance fund and the funds management arm of two super funds – Michael Block has taken on a different challenge as CIO of Papua New Guinea’s main pension fund. He speaks…

(Pictured: Ron Liling) Comment by Greg Bright Ron Liling once famously said, after he had sold and had considered buying back InTech Investment Consulting, that “manager selection is a mug’s game”. Recent events, including some new international research, support this view. Liling founded InTech in the 1980s with his old school friend John Schaffer. The pair…