The Your Future Your Super (YFYS) benchmarks will require an all-hands-on-deck approach to a “performance test to be reckoned with”, according to Willis Towers Watson’s Nick Callil. With funds required to inform members if they fail the test – an “unpalatable action for any fund” – and barred from accepting new members into an underperforming…
GMO has released its latest borderline-apocalyptic seven-year forecast for stocks and bonds as it warns clients to “concentrate assets where the bubble ain’t”. GMO’s extraordinarily bearish forecasts predict a negative annual real return over seven years across the majority of both stocks and bonds, with only emerging markets value stocks getting a positive, if slim,…
Global stimulus and inflationary expectations mean that listed infrastructure is in the recovery hot seat, but Your Future Your Super presents a homegrown challenge for managers. “We’ve got this perfect storm for listed infrastructure at the moment in the sense that the fundamentals are good and this huge growth thematic is still intact,” according to…
Recently hitting its two-year anniversary, Paradice Investment Management’s emerging markets strategy has been on a “rollercoaster ride”. Co-portfolio managers Edward Su and Michael Roberge have spent the last two years navigating the frenzied market volatility of covid-19, the fallout of mass protests in Hong Kong, and trade wars with China as they pursue opportunities in…
The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors has found that company boards are failing to address sexual harassment despite the issue surging in importance through 2020. ACSI surveyed 118 S&P/ASX 200 companies and conducted in-depth interviews with representatives of 16 of them, finding “a range of maturity” across respondents in managing the material risk of sexual…
With the passage of Your Future Your Super through the Senate, the Morrison Government won a key victory against the superannuation industry. A bigger fight looms over the scheduled SG increase. While it wasn’t quite the utter dismemberment faced by the Government’s industrial relations Bill in April 2021, the YFYS reforms were significantly altered by…
Little known in the broader Australian market, GQG Partners has become a manager of choice for some of the country’s largest investors. The firm is preparing for a push into the wholesale market. When talking to GQG, the name of CIO and founder Rajiv Jain is always a part of the conversation. He and co-founder…
GMO has hit back at critics of its bearish seven-year forecasts, saying “great companies with great narratives can still experience price movements that are too great”. GMO compared asset class forecasts from the seven-year period leading up to March 2000 with forecasts from 2014 onwards, noting that asset prices have both grown around 70 per…
Industry fund-owned ‘The New Daily’ is once again in political hot water after a controversial deal with AustralianSuper to auto-subscribe 800,000 of the fund’s members to the publication. ‘The New Daily’ has become a bee in the bonnet for a number of Liberal backbenchers, most notably NSW Senator Andrew Bragg, who has characterised the publication…
It’s approaching orthodoxy that a merger is always in the best interests of members. But is bigger always better? What is the true price of scale? Leeanne Turner, Spirit Super’s inaugural chief executive, told a CMSF audience in May: “If you’re not considering a merger then you either have your head in the sand or…
