News

(Pictured: Seth Merrin) Liquidnet, the global off-market trading network for asset managers, is looking to emulate its coverage of the listed space my moving into unlisted transactions. Headline-grabbing IPOs mask the fact that private companies are staying private longer. On a visit to Australia last week, Seth Merrin, Liquidnet’s founder, said there are only about half…

(Pictured: Ian Robertson) Ian Robertson, the secretary of the depa trade union and former chair of AIST, has resigned his long-standing position on the board of NSW’s Local Government Super, where he was also chair of its investment committee. The union has nominated Joanna Davison, former funds manager, as his replacement. This is how he announced…

Comment by John Schaffer* On October 14, Investor Strategy News published an article entitled: “What value is manager research and selection?”  Whilst the article purported to have an even-handed expose of views on the subject, it could easily have left one with the impression that manager research doesn’t add value, that we are unable to…

(Pictured: Marianne Brown) Trading in OTC derivatives in the US has become as close to real time as is technologically possible, thanks largely to regulation from the Federal Trade Commission. According to Omgeo, there will be a domino effect in other markets and instruments. Omgeo’s president and CEO, Marianne Brown, was in Australia last week as…

(Pictured: Damian Hill) REST Super won the Super Fund of the Year Award plus the Pension of the Year Award at the SuperRatings annual event last week. But Damian Hill, REST’s chief executive, predicted the pensions category would change dramatically in the future. Hill said that pension products represented the biggest challenge for super funds and…

(Pictured: Paul Woolley) There is no evidence that today’s finance industry is more efficient than it was in the 1960s, the annual conference of the Paul Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality was told last week. Professor Thomas Phillippon, of New York University, said that unit costs associated with the industry were higher…

(Pictured: Ron Liling) Comment by Greg Bright Ron Liling once famously said, after he had sold and had considered buying back InTech Investment Consulting, that “manager selection is a mug’s game”. Recent events, including some new international research, support this view. Liling founded InTech in the 1980s with his old school friend John Schaffer. The pair…

(Pictured: James Gruber) Insiders are bailing out of Hong Kong property, retail and financial services and the likely buyers of various big assets on the block are “dumb institutions”, analyst James Gruber says in his latest note to clients over the weekend. Gruber’s newsletter, ‘Asia Confidential’ says it is no surprise that the smart money is…

(Pictured: Robert Gottliebsen) BRW is/was more than a magazine. It changed the way big business interacted with the media and, consequently, the wider world of investors and consumers. Its last print edition will appear on November 28. Buy a copy and keep it. Fairfax launched Business Review Weekly in 1981, during the Fraser Government period,…

A research paper from the trading efficiency research firm Inalytics has added some weight to the growing evidence quantifying the value of good governance at listed companies. At least the ‘G’ in ESG makes money. The Inalytics research report published last week, ‘Does It Pay to Own Companies That do the Right Thing?’, finds that…

(Pictured: Peter Dorrian) The ‘great rotation’ may not be happening as predicted, but there is no doubt investors are deciding not to rollover their term deposits in the current environment and are moving into higher-yield-paying securities. Equity Trustees and its fund manager partner, PIMCO, are looking to capitalize on the trend. Equity Trustee last week…

Deloitte has produced a paper which tries to analyze the future of the super industry. There are lots of assumptions, some of them questionable, but it is a worthy exercise and well worth reading. Click here for the full report. The 30-page report says that industry funds will continue to grow over the next 20…