News

Asia and Australia are outstripping most of the rest of the world for growth in private capital raisings. But private equity managers, especially big buyout firms, are finding deals to be slow to bring to fruition. In its first special report on alternatives in the Asia Pacific region, Preqin provides more detailed analysis of private…

Following its BNZ win in May, State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) has picked up the final large passive institutional mandate abandoned by Vanguard in New Zealand. According to new disclosure documents, ASB will shift its indexed Australasian equities portfolio – of an estimated NZ$4 billion plus – from current manager Vanguard to SSGA this month….

A new financial advisory firm-run KiwiSaver scheme is set to launch with former AMP Capital multi-asset CIO Sean Henaghan in charge of investments. Henaghan, well known in Australia for his 15 years at AMP Capital, was an ex-pat Kiwi stranded back home last year under covid-19 border restrictions. He returns to active duties at Aurora…

The Your Future Your Super (YFYS) benchmarks will require an all-hands-on-deck approach to a “performance test to be reckoned with”, according to Willis Towers Watson’s Nick Callil. With funds required to inform members if they fail the test – an “unpalatable action for any fund” – and barred from accepting new members into an underperforming…

NZ Super and Australia’s Perpetual Investments have joined a group of global investors in an engagement program involving human rights and the use of facial recognition technology. They are the only Australasian members of a group of 50 fiduciary investors which speak for about US$4.5 trillion (A$5.9 trillion) under management. The initiative was launched by…

GMO has released its latest borderline-apocalyptic seven-year forecast for stocks and bonds as it warns clients to “concentrate assets where the bubble ain’t”. GMO’s extraordinarily bearish forecasts predict a negative annual real return over seven years across the majority of both stocks and bonds, with only emerging markets value stocks getting a positive, if slim,…

Joseph Lai, the top-performing Asia equities manager who resigned from Platinum Asset Management on December 29 last year, is set to join Fidante’s new boutique, Ox Capital. He will reportedly link up with another long-term emerging markets specialist, Doug Huey. The two had worked together at Platinum, where Huey was an investment analyst, prior to…

Mingshi Investment Management, a staff-owned Shanghai-based China ‘A’ shares specialist, has opened an Australian office with the recruitment of experienced marketer Michael Negline. Mingshi is unusual in several respects. It was founded by two academics, professors Yu Yuan and Robert Stambaugh, who met at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It is a…

The long-awaited mega-merger between two global financial services giants, Aon and Willis Towers Watson, has hit a major snag as the US Department of Justice moved to block the transaction. In a statement last week (June 16), the Department of Justice (DOJ) says it had “filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today to block Aon’s [US]$30…

The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors has found that company boards are failing to address sexual harassment despite the issue surging in importance through 2020. ACSI surveyed 118 S&P/ASX 200 companies and conducted in-depth interviews with representatives of 16 of them, finding “a range of maturity” across respondents in managing the material risk of sexual…

Evergreen Ratings has singled out the iPartners for wholesale investors for providing ‘appropriate’ liquidity in an inherently illiquid private debt market. In its latest ratings for the burgeoning private debt asset class, where non-institutional products are starting to take hold for smaller investors, the new ratings service which concentrates on alternatives offerings for wholesale, has…

The main focus for ESG investors, as with many of world’s policy makers and influencers, over recent years has been on the ‘E’. The ‘S’, though, is far from forgotten. The impact of climate change and the measures aimed at achieving net zero carbon emissions will also cause massive disruptions to societies as a whole,…