News

(Pictured: Graham Rich) America will either get us out of our malaise or not. China will either drag us back into problem territory or not. The yield play of the past six years may be over or not. It was difficult to get a handle on market trends at last week’s Portfolio Construction Summit. The toughest…

By Nial Gooding* Buy low, sell high. Easy to say but hard, in the real world, to do. What if we sell high and things go higher? What if we buy low and things go lower? On the downside, though there comes a point where, if assets are real, companies are going concerns and profitability…

(Pictured: Christina Liosis) Christina Liosis, the former chief financial officer at Telstra Super, who oversaw the fund’s operational transition in securities services and member directed investment options, has joined systems provider FNZ. Liosis has become CFO for Australasia, based in Melbourne. FNZ has offices in New Zealand, where the company started, Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore in…

(Pictured: John Pickard) Martin Currie, the Edinburgh-based global equities manager, is now trading about 50 per cent of its assets through its new Asia Pacific hub in Singapore, which was opened as a full-service office in 2012. The office covers stock research, sales, client service and dealing across the region. About 16 per cent of the…

(Pictured: John Seo) John Seo likes his job because he feels like he is doing something worthwhile. He’s the world’s largest investor in catastrophe bonds. In the funds management industry we tend to focus on the demographic problem of ageing with respect to government funding and deficits into the future. Our old-age pension system and subsidized…

(Pictured: Paul Guest) It’s not just in the residential markets of Sydney and Melbourne that it’s a good time to sell. Core commercial property holdings are fully priced in the region and global property manager LaSalle Investment Management says it has been actively divesting of its real estate in “gateway” cities. As part of its “Investment…

(Pictured: Stephen Tremelling) Stephen Tremelling, the former head of sales and business development for BNP Paribas Securities Services, has joined RBC Investor & Treasury Services as director of sales and distribution. Tremelling left BNP last November after 10 years with the firm. His job there has been filled by former consultant, and previously custodian, Ian Perkins….

Thomson Horstmann & Bryant (THB), an American microcap and small-cap manager, has set aside some of its precious capacity for Australian investors. During his first trip to Australia, THB portfolio manager Christopher Cuesta, said last week that a lot of investors were starting to look at the microcap market as a proxy for private equity,…

(Pictured: Rohan Mead) With only the hint of a smile, Rohan Mead said last week that, within the next 10 years, there would be more people in Australia suffering from dementia than there were currently living in Tasmania. The problems associated with an ageing population are serious and complicated. And they are problems that super…

(Pictured: Martin Goss) Australia is set to overtake Japan within the next 10 years and become the third-largest pension fund market in the world, figures compiled by Towers Watson indicate. But even the slower-growing Canadian and Dutch markets should also overtake Japan, at least when measured in US dollars. Japan grew by only 1.1 per…

(Pictured: Sean Healey) The bigger multi-affiliate managers are a good proxy for the state of funds management in general and the biggest, in terms of manager spread, is Affiliated Managers Group. It’s fourth-quarter results, released in the US last week, signal the good times may have returned. AMG, which has a five-person sales and client…

(Pictured: Andrea Slattery) Technical connections to its customers – fund managers, registry providers and brokers and platforms – represent the final phase prior to commencement for the ASX’s mFund Settlement Services, following the last regulatory hurdle being overcome last week. ASIC’s approval followed the completion, from the ASX side, of the required technology build which…