News

After repeated and universal criticism from all major super industry bodies, the Government has agreed to two amendments to its performance benchmark as part of the Government’s proposed Your Future, Your Super legislation. The Government announced last week (April 28) that it would allow the inclusion of infrastructure and unlisted property as well as administration…

Michael Rice officially entered the wind-down period of his career last Friday (April 30) with the completion of the sale of Rice Warner, now to be known as Deloitte Superannuation. All but a handful of administrative staff transferred, moving out of the heritage-listed 2 Martin Place office, around the corner and a few hundred metres…

The China growth story is putting increasing pressure on index providers to maintain the integrity of their indices. Emerging markets indices, for instance, may be becoming irrelevant. According to Rob Lovelace, the president and vice-chairman of Capital Group and one of the world’s most influential investors, the index providers “don’t really want to be the…

While the consensus view of credit markets is that investors should be long, at least one credit manager, Maurice Meijers of Robeco Asset Management, takes the other side. In the global equity and fixed income manager’s quarterly outlook delivered last week (April 22), Meijers, the chief executive of the firm’s Singapore business and a fixed…

In a highly unusual move, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) has cracked down on fund managers advertising post-COVID boom-time annual returns. The regulator has warned managers that advertising any “phenomenal” returns garnered over the 12 months to March 31 could “mislead investors”. Global share markets bounced back spectacularly from the brief COVID-induced shock early last…

It was little more than a year ago that trading spreads across a range of instruments had blown out to record levels, courtesy of the first market impact of covid-19. Now, they are as narrow as they have ever been. It’s that sort of volatility with which most of the investment community has had to…

While ESG investing through equities attracts most of the limelight, fixed income is increasingly gaining the attention it deserves. The asset class is, after all, about 40 times the size of the equities market. In a webinar last week to coincide with World Earth Day (April 22), Insight Investment Australia hosted Joshua Kendall, the firm’s…

About a third of securities trading firms on both sides of the deal experienced operational stresses during the peak covid-19 volatility last year, according to a new DTCC white paper. The paper, carried out by global back-office behemoth DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) and consultancy firm McKinsey & Company found some weak links in…

Research Affiliates has taken the study of factor timing to a user-friendly new level through a paper which argues that the market’s momentum and valuation are good predictors of economic influences. The paper, by Mike Aked, director of research for Australia, shows that a strategy based on a factor’s discount to historical averages of value…

The three largest global custodian banks have enjoyed hefty increases in the total assets under custody and administration in the March quarter as markets continued to rebound. BNY Mellon is still the biggest. BNY Mellon remained the largest in the world, by a whisker, ahead of State Street, but third-placed J.P. Morgan Chase, America’s largest…

Front-to-back services and market activity have helped the big global asset servicing companies to record levels of assets under custody and administration in the March quarter, despite falling interest income. State Street emphasised the success of its front-to-back offering, which it calls ‘State Street Alpha’, with the quarterly Wall Street earnings statement (April 16) coinciding…

In recent years, the global surge towards ensuring diversity and inclusion within corporate leadership has intensified. In 2020, industry super fund HESTA launched an initiative called ’40:40 Vision’. It advocates for more diversity in executive leadership in corporate Australia by setting a gender balance target of at least 40 per cent men and 40 per…