Many big investors would be better off building their own diverse portfolio of hedge funds than using certain types of the many multi-asset strategies and products now on the market, according to a new paper by Mercer. The paper, ‘Making Sense of Multi-Asset’, focuses on two of the most popular of the four types of…
Emerge Foundation, the charity backed by many funds management and financial advisory firms, last week donated $210,000 to the Australian Catholic University to help continue its work boosting education in Timor Leste. After 12 years of donations, Emerge has become the ACU’s largest single private donor, the university’s head of operations and deputy vice-chancellor, Stephen…
Comment by Greg Bright Today, every newspaper, every newsletter, every news website in Australia will blast its readers with more news and views on the Royal Commission. The only view I’d like to read is that of Adele Ferguson. Journalism is not what it used to be, but, thank heavens, there are still some proper…
One of Australia’s oldest corporate super funds, the IAG & NRMA Superannuation Plan, is to outsource its investments and administration to Sunsuper. Ironically, the NRMA fund’s default option has outperformed that of Sunsuper for the last 10 years. And its fees look reasonable too. The fund started life as a defined benefit fund for NRMA…
Link Group has reached an agreement to sell the newly acquired ‘corporate and private clients’ business of Capita Asset Services, the UK asset servicing company it paid about A$1.5 billion for in mid-2017. The £240 (A$433 million) from the sale will go to paying down debt. The share market liked the news. In a prepared…
The IPO market is getting tougher, reflecting general market conditions, although the dollar value of Australian IPOs last year was double that of the previous year, according to the annual survey by advisory firm HLB Mann Judd. Its ‘IPO Watch’ report, overseen by Marcus Ohm, a Perth-based partner, shows last year started positively, helped by…
Forget funds management. How’s this for a contract? QIC has just signed its second 50-year deal with a US university to provide a campus parking system and facilities. The increasingly global manager is ramping up its infrastructure investment portfolio. QIC has set up a new company for the arrangement, MasParc, and committed an unspecified amount…
Multi-affiliate managers tend to be good gauges of markets, overall. They do not favour any particular style and can predict, better than most, likely turns of events. The mood from Grant Samuel Funds Management is not good. The global economy will probably stagnate, the manager says. Australian house prices will provide more gloom and the…
The life insurance industry must seriously rethink its approach to income protection in order to see more people take up this critically important cover and ensure a vibrant, sustainable future, according to a new paper by ClearView. The paper, ‘Income Protection and the Economic Cycle’, reflects on the significant deterioration in the product’s growth and claims…
by David Chaplin The meteoric ascent of index-investing has yet to seriously distort financial markets and could, by contrast, spark new strategies for active managers, according to Mercer. In its thematic outlook for 2019, the firm says the investor index-rush has not, to date, cancelled out the ‘price discovery’ power of markets or created broader…
