News

More opportunities among value stocks and an increasing disconnect between market sentiment and company fundamentals, particularly for companies focused primarily on Australian demand, are among the highlights for the latest annual reporting season. In its semi-annual review of the reporting season results, including broker and company revisions, and with the aid of more than 150…

Don Russell, who joined the AustralianSuper board in May this year, will become the fund’s next chairman following the retirement of Heather Ridout, who has been the chair since 2013. Ian Silk, AustralianSuper chief executive, said: “Don has an extraordinary range of experience in both the private and public sectors and also has a very…

The NZ$43 billion (A40.1 billion) $NZ Superannuation Fund (NZS) revealed it has wound up three private equity mandates over the last year with a total value of about NZ$100 million. According to the NZS website, it has exited the NZ$35 million Hancock Natural Resources timber investment after a 14-year holding period. As well, the fund…

A “challenging” presentation from UK-based macro-economic analysis firm, Absolute Strategy Research (ASR), has underscored the dangers facing investors in an era of low interest rates and rising recession risk, according to Andrew Bascand, Harbour Asset Management managing director. Bascand said the gloomy analysis, delivered last week in NZ at a Harbour roadshow by ASR co-founder…

Of all the big questions investors need to address across various time periods, the biggest, over the short- to medium-term at least, is undoubtedly ‘where are we in the cycle?’. While difficult to answer with precision, the strong consensus is ‘late’. What to do about it is the next big question. Aviva Investors – the…

Brett Himbury is retiring as chief executive of IFM Investors and Bernard Reilly is making a comeback as the next chief executive of Sunsuper. The two moves juxtapose neatly. They also indicate the human strains of running big financial organisations. In the profit-for-member sector you don’t get paid several million dollars a year to run…

The CIPR legislation, whereby big super funds need to have a retirement products strategy in place by July next year and the ability to implement it by July 2022, has taken what seems like forever to get going. But funds should not take a breather because of the time extension they have been offered, according…

The days of custodians being confined to the backoffice of big super funds and managers are long gone. Through new services, they have moved up the chain through the middle office and, now, the front office. They’ll be running the reception desk, too, soon. The latest development is from Northern Trust in the US which…

Euromoney, the London Stock Exchange-listed information company, which recently pulled out of its conference interests in Australia and New Zealand, has now decided to review the entirety of its asset management division, which includes the global publication Institutional Investor. Euromoney, announced to the LSE last week, in a one-line statement, that it was reviewing its asset…

Frontier Advisors has recently quizzed the many managers with which it deals about their predictive capabilities. And, subsequently, this has raised questions about funds’ inhouse investment strategies, too. Investments are not as easy as APRA seems to think. A client note to be published today (September 23) by Frontier says that predicting short-term, annual, performance…

China is our biggest trading partner. The US is our biggest investor. What do we do when they have a spat? From an investor’s viewpoint we should take a disciplined approach to analyse the likely outcomes from the dispute. And they are not as bad as you might think. According to Chi Lo, the senior…

They may look unstable at the moment, given the uncertainties in the developed versus the developing world, but emerging markets probably represent the best prospects for our future. The big “contrarian trades” at the moment are international versus US and value versus growth. DWS (formerly known as Deutsche Asset Management) which has a long track…