News

(Pictured: Amanda Skelly) State Street Global Advisors, the biggest provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Australia, is predicting another year of strong growth in the sector following last year’s 50 per cent increase, which took total ETF fund assets to $10 billion. Amanda Skelly, head of ETFs for SSgA in Australia, told clients last week that…

(Pictured: Damian Moloney) Frontier Advisors, Australia’s second-largest asset consultant, has added the UK and Europe to its research alliance base, complementing a deal with Segal Rogers Casey for North America last year. Alliances with research firms covering South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, are in the wings. Frontier and Rogers Casey last year…

 (Pictured: Simon Shields) One of the various consequences of the GFC for super funds and other investors is the greater freedom they are now prepared to offer their managers. It is a bit like – but not exactly – a return to the balanced fund era of the 1980s. A new boutique which emerged in…

(Pictured: Marco Colantonio) Resolution Capital is celebrating its 10th anniversary as an independent listed property funds manager. The Australian company, which now performs on the global stage, has had an interesting history. It seems likely, also, to have an interesting future. This is the brief history: The business which became Resolution Capital (RCL) started as…

AustralianSuper has made its first investment in the UK shopping centre market, through its expanding internal investment team and via a co-investment with the BT (British Telecom) Pension Scheme. The deal marks the first property investment by the AustralianSuper inhouse managers. The deal was organized by Hermes Real Estate Investment Management, which sold its investment…

(Pictured: Spiro Paule) Centric Wealth and Financial Index Wealth Accountants will merge, assuming last week’s announced proposed agreed takeover proceeds, to become one of Australia’s largest, and unaligned, advisory groups, speaking for $7.6 billion under advice. This may have implications for the institutional part of the industry too. Financial Index’s (Findex) backer, private equity firm…

Comment by Greg Bright It was controversial when APRA announced a few years back that it would be publishing its own performance tables for super funds, using collected data dating back to 2004. Commercial researchers who had been doing this for a while – Rainmaker, SuperRatings and ChantWest – were concerned. They needn’t have been….

Pictured: William De Vijlder Multi-affiliate manager BNP Paribas Investment Partners seems reasonably bullish on the major asset classes for 2014, according to its latest annual forecasts. Bond yields will rise but so will equities, including emerging markets. More importantly, flows are likely to return to the emerging markets. And credit, especially illiquid credit, offers new opportunities….

Pictured: James Gruber Back in September last, the annual New York client conference of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which always attracts some big-name Australian companies and fund managers, included several sessions at which speakers questioned the sustainability of valuations of the big four Australian banks. Hedge fund managers were beginning to short the Aussie…

The first UK license to use Chinese RMB to purchase Chinese stocks from outside of China, known as RQFII (RMB Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor), was granted last week to the London-based Ashmore Group in a much-anticipated deal that also included the appointment of HSBC as custodian for the new investment product. The UK is the…

By Greg Bright A consensus of pundits drawn out by the media in its time of need – when there is little actual news to report – seems to be warning about both a further slowdown in the Australian economy and a relatively lacklustre sharemarket this year. Normally the two don’t go together, or, rather,…

Pictured: Kirby RappellBig super funds are likely to have had their best calendar year since at least 2000, according to preliminary figures from SuperRatings. The median fund balanced option returned 15.5 per cent in the 12 months to December 31, making it the best year since the research firm began tracking this index in 2000….