News

Cliff Asness, the renowned founder of AQR Capital, has published a new white paper critiquing common ways used to compare the overall performance of hedge funds and suggesting better comparisons for investors to make. But he has a sting in the tail for some hedge fund managers. The paper, ‘The Hedgie in Winter’, says that hedge…

MySuper options delivered strong returns in the past one, three and five years, as did ‘non-MySuper’ super options, according to the latest Rainmaker research. But not-for-profit funds continue to dominate MySuper returns compared with commercial funds. And the gap between the competing sectors is even wider for other balanced strategies. Rainmaker announced last week its…

MSCI has included 226 China A shares in its global emerging markets index, after a protracted process urged on by potential investors and competition from fellow index provider FTSE. MSCI expects at least US$600 billion of foreign capital flow into China as a result. New ETPs are bound to spring up. Jonathan Howie, the former…

The draft report of the Productivity Commission into superannuation, as critical as it is about the system, at least has a silver lining with respect to fees. Unlike APRA’s public statements in the past, the Commission has made 38 references to “net returns” and only three references to “low cost”. Maybe we have turned the…

by Suzanne Holden* The industry is once again facing significant transformation with the recent Federal Budget, the Productivity Commission report and the Royal Commission all proposing changes. But this will be an evolution rather than the feared revolution, in my view. Let’s face it, this industry, since inception, has endured continual tampering – with every…

Hedge fund managers are increasingly putting their assets to work in the ESG space, with more than 10 per cent, according to a global survey by the Alternative Investment Management Association, allocated to such strategies. The survey coincides with new activity, too, in Australia, ahead of the next industry Forum which will include an ESG…

by David Chaplin The global managed funds industry reaped the largest harvest of inflows in a decade last year, according to a new Morningstar report, with passive vehicles the major beneficiary. Overall net flows into “global open-end funds and exchange-traded products” hit almost US$2 trillion during 2017, more than double the US$835 billion recorded the…

In a rapid-fire series of conference sessions organised by information provider Bloomberg in Sydney last week, a group of high-profile super fund investment executives had their say across a range of issues and trends. They are not as happy as you might think they should be. The participants were: Mark Delaney, CIO of AustralianSuper; Brendan…

by Greg Bright With a big question mark over both equities and bonds because of their valuations, institutional investors have been seeking, for some time, to further diversify their portfolios with uncorrelated assets. Increasingly, they are combining several trends to use risk premia strategies to meet this aim. At an investor roundtable in Melbourne last…

A surge in funds manager searches by institutional investors in the year to March was led by appointments in private markets, in both number of searches and the size of the mandates, according to the quarterly report from search consultant bfinance. The bfinance quarterly analysis also shows that there was a significant increase in interest in…

Comment by Greg Bright There has been lots of talk about AMP within the funds management and advisory sectors of the industry in recent weeks. Everyone, including insiders, has a story or two and has heard many more. Who was to blame; what can be done to save AMP? But the announcement that former CBA…

What Australians call ‘micro caps’, of course, are not what the Americans call them. Ours are not only a lot smaller, they have different risk/return characteristics. Brookvine, an Australian manager and packager of investment strategies, is about to round out its range of micro-cap funds. They are worth a good look. Brookvine, based in leafy…