The outgoing chair of Australia’s sovereign wealth fund has come out swinging against “self-styled experts” with “foolhardy schemes” to spend the $200 billion it manages, warning that winding up the Future Fund will leave the government – and future generations of Australians – worse off.
For the last decade, equities (repackaged and otherwise) have reigned supreme. But in a market where everything might soon start to break, investors have to be more nimble.
The “well-intentioned and genuine” claims super funds made about their sustainable bona fides have landed them in the regulators’ crosshairs. They’re going to have to figure out how to actually follow through on them if they want to win the battle for members’ retirement savings.
The $75 billion industry fund is creating an “active, fundamental stock-picking” internal global equity capability and has lined up a former Comgest portfolio manager to oversee it.
Australian Retirement Trust (ART) is getting bigger and more complex. To make sure that doesn’t turn into a big, complex problem, the fund has found itself a new head of investment resilience and is thinking hard about what’s really driving returns in a post-Covid world.
The growing scale of the carbon credit market – and the fact that the next stage of emissions abatement isn’t going to be as simple as the last – means that more institutional attention is warranted, according to Apostle. Just watch out for the volatility.
If or when there’s another royal commission into financial services, the profit-to-member and industry funds will not be able to say they weren’t warned about their problems. They were warned twice on Tuesday alone.
Markets could be asked to absorb a lot more debt as central banks lighten their balance sheets. But as governments continue to issue it, nobody knows whether unwinding can be done in an orderly manner.
Minimum drawdowns aren’t meant to be a default, but plenty of members use them that way. Frontier Advisors wants funds to pay them a “retirement wage” instead.
The rise of artificial intelligence is one of the most significant developments since the dawn of the internet, and Citi Securities Services is exploring use cases for it both inside and outside its business in an effort to make the work of asset servicing more efficient.