Your Future Your Super (YFYS) will make super funds bigger and more risk averse – except when it doesn’t, according to a new report from J.P. Morgan Asset Management (JPMAM). The report, which follows J.P. Morgan’s inaugural survey of super fund executives, shows that CIOs are now adapting their investment strategies to the demands of…
Australia’s super funds are racing to achieve massive size in the understanding that it will create untold benefits for members. But “a little but of circumspection and caution” is required. “People seem to be taking it as a fact that you just need to be bigger, and that it’s obvious you need to be bigger…
While markets have so far shrugged off the inevitable rate rises, there’s plenty more to come – and the global outlook keeps getting gloomier. The Fed’s decision to unleash massive monetary stimulus in the early days of Covid-19 (and in nearly every economic crisis before it) ushered in a brief golden age for markets. But…
ASIC’s investigation into whether super funds took advantage of inside knowledge when switching investments in early 2020 has ended with the regulator taking no action. The drawn-out saga of ASIC’s investigation into alleged “insider trading” at super funds has come to a close, with the corporate regulator saying it will take no further action against…
The fight in Ukraine is unlikely to spill over into a shooting war between Russia and the NATO countries. That doesn’t mean impossible, and investors “should absolutely worry about unintended consequences.” For the last month or so, investors have been reading the entrails of a beast they’re broadly unfamiliar with – geopolitics – to determine…
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that equity market returns are likely to be muted going forward. But salvation might arrive in the form of domestic activist strategies. “From a timing perspective, we think the forward-looking environment presents a much more challenging return outlook for equity investors given the extended low interest rate and bull market…
While Liberals and Labor have sparred for decades, it seems that many Australians believe the ideological conflict waged over superannuation is mostly moot. The super wars have raged unchecked since the introduction of the superannuation guarantee (SG) in the heady days of 1993. But the ideological battles in Parliament and the press have been waged…
APRA’s orthodoxy on scale and its importance to funds has been disputed by all comers, with “massive and passive” a common refrain. But the regulator is hoping to prove that bigger really is better. One of the more controversial moments of Helen Rowell’s career as APRA’s superannuation executive was the claim that any fund below…
Fifteen years ago, Thomas Friedman said that globalisation had finally made the world “flat” and that a golden age of prosperity was upon us. A month ago, that stopped being true. Love him or loathe him (and many lean towards the latter), Thomas Friedman occasionally hits the nail on the head. In his 2005 book…
In a world where the fundamentals of long-term market dynamics have “lost relevancy”, institutional investors are pondering a wall of worry – and having trouble figuring out how to climb it. A survey of the world’s largest institutional investors at a time like this will deliver some gloomy responses. Indeed, many investment officers seem to…
