News

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…

Notwithstanding the financial setback suffered by its corporate parent, AMP Capital is continuing to push its global capabilities up the food chain, setting up a separate infrastructure equity unit to cater for large pension funds which seek sophisticated structures, such as co-investments and specialist investment management support. AMP Capital announced last week that the new…

With new representation for Australia and New Zealand, launched last week, Amundi Asset Management, Europe’s largest funds management firm, has shone a light on three key areas of its broad-based global offering: US-denominated asset classes, ESG strategies and passive management. While the manager, which has about EU1.45 trillion (A$2.31 trillion) under management, has doubled its…

Andrew Formica, Australian boy made good – very good – in London, has had little time off between big jobs. The former chief executive of Henderson Group (HHG Plc) and co-chief of Janus Henderson Group, will become chief executive of troubled Jupiter Fund Management in March. Jupiter, a predominantly retail house, has been suffering substantial…

It’s the US versus the rest of the world in institutional investment management, new research from Fidelity Investments has found. The US is not as keen as almost all other countries on new technologies, new asset classes and socially responsible investing. The recently-published 11th annual Fidelity Institutional Asset Management global fund manager survey reveals a large…

Almost since indices were invented, primarily as a form of measurement, their power to influence the behaviour of market participants and therefore the whole market as defined by those indices has been well understood and sometimes criticised, particularly plain vanilla market-cap indices. But in the past five years this power has considerably weakened, according to…

Led by Gillian Broadbent, former Bankers Trust executive, busy non-executive director and Reserve Bank alumnus, the financial services industry once again contributed several high-powered figures to the Australia Day honours list. Broadbent received the highest honour of the group, Companion of the Order of Australia, an AC. She was already an Officer in the General…

Jeremy Grantham, 80, is all over the science of studying climate change and he doesn’t like what he sees. But, true to his famous fund manager roots, he is able to look at the investment implications and opportunities, while throwing some barbs at ostrich-like policy makers along the way. In a rare webinar for Australian…