News

(Pictured: Martin Smith) Mainstream BPO, the fund management administration specialist, has both expanded its Asian presence and added to its Australian service offering through the acquisition of a Hong Kong-based middle-office service provider, HFO Hong Kong. The privately owned firm has had a fully fledged office in Singapore for the past two years but only a…

(Pictured: Mike Mendelson) AQR Capital Management has come out in support of the often-maligned ‘high frequency trading’ because of the liquidity, and therefore additional efficiency, it provides to markets. The interesting thing is that AQR is not a provider of HFT strategies – simply a well-informed user of markets. Michael Mendelson, a principal at AQR who…

(Pictured: Cliff Asness) by Greg Bright The people who run AQR Capital Management are not the types who let sleeping dogs lay. They are happy, even, to broach confronting subjects at their celebratory 10th anniversary Australian seminar, held in Sydney last week. For the uninitiated, Michael Lewis is the celebrated American writer of various finance-oriented best…

(Pictured: Patrick Noble) Zurich Financial Services Australia has secured a model portfolio inclusion from a major institutionally owned dealer group, with its global share fund. The fund searches for earnings a little differently to those of other managers. Rather than following investment norms by focusing on the overall level and duration of a stock’s earnings growth,…

(Pictured: Gorky Urquieta) by Penny Pryor There are still opportunities in both emerging market debt and emerging market equities according to portfolio managers at global fund manager Neuberger Berman. In Australia recently to meet with clients, co-head of emerging markets debt, Gorky Urquieta, said that the team did not really subscribe to the view that there…

(Pictured: Paul Costello) Paul Costello, the founding chief executive of the Future Fund, has joined the board of Qantas Super, taking the spot vacated by Australia’s new Governor General, and knight, Sir Peter Cosgrove. In a perhaps-unavoidable understatement, Anne Ward, Qantas Super’s chair, said: “Paul brings a wealth of experience in investments, governance, operations and superannuation…

(Pictured: Bernard Reilly) Bernard Reilly has left State Street Global Advisors, where he was most recently global head of strategy and an executive vice president, after 24 years with the firm, the last nine of which were internationally focused. He decided, he said last week, that, with two teenage boys, he wanted to spend most of…

(Pictured: Andrew Boal) Independence of trustee board directors and how to deal with members’ longevity risk are two of the biggest concerns of superannuation funds, according to Towers Watson Australia managing director, Andrew Boal. To deal with the first, Boal recently released a paper that concluded there isn’t enough to support the compulsory appointment of independent…

(Pictured: Maria Wilton) Expectations of rising interest rates are not traditionally seen as conducive to strong bond performance, but that hasn’t stopped at least two local fund managers announcing they will enter this space over the past month. And investors shouldn’t believe all market hype when it comes to fixed income and interest rates anyway, according…

(Pictured: Cathy Binnington) by Penny Pryor. A cross-industry working group on indigenous issues in superannuation is putting together a discussion paper that will address some of the inequities of the system that effect indigenous Australians. The working group also hopes to develop a set of guidelines that will help deal with the systemic disadvantages that the…

(Pictured: Virginie Maisonneuve) The current low rate environment should be supportive of US stocks but investors need to look for regions, sectors and companies that will benefit from solid fundamentals. “While bank lending remains constrained, particularly in Europe, good companies – such as Apple recently – are good examples of how companies are using low rates…

(Pictured: Anthony Asher) by Greg Bright. ‘ESG’ is, for good reason, an important consideration for fiduciary investors. The ‘G’, in particular, seems to make sense and, maybe more importantly, money. But our measurement of governance has to date been pretty rough. A group of academics from the University of NSW have now produced an interesting paper…