News

Research Affiliates, US-based global quant manager which has established offices in Sydney and Melbourne in the past couple of years, has called for compulsory changes in the way companies report carbon emissions to assist the investment world make more informed decisions about responses to the impact of climate change. Vitali Kalesnik, partner and European director…

NZ-based FNZ, the financial software firm run out of London, will have to offload its $260 million-plus Australian software asset within months after the UK competition regulator smothered the deal in a final ruling last week. In a decision handed down on Thursday, November 5, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered FNZ to sell…

BMO Global Asset Management has recruited Harry Page from Rainmaker Information as the Sydney-based assistant v.p. for intermediary sales, primarily focused on two of the firm’s subsidiaries, Pyrford International and LGM Investments. This will allow director Michael Angwin, who has been at BMO Global Asset Management for six years, to focus more attention on the…

It’s time to adopt a different view of emerging markets, according to Will Sutcliffe. Time to shake off the connotations of a third-world marketplace and recognise that the major emerging markets are the lands of giants, not demons. Such is the evocative view of Baillie Gifford and its emerging markets specialists. Sutcliffe, the head of…

Capital Group has a handy person to call on when it comes to looking at US politics from an Australian perspective – a former Australian ambassador to the US and Capital’s vice chairman, Michael Thawley. He thinks investors shouldn’t be too worried by a Biden victory. In a webinar held while the result was still…

About half of institutional asset owner costs get lost in the wash, according to a new study by CEM Benchmarking. An analysis of 24 large global asset owners representing over US$4.4 trillion found 49 per cent of investment costs were unreported. “Our research indicates that, at best, only half of true total investment management costs…

Australia remains tiny on a world scale for alternative investments, with just 1-2 per cent of the global market, despite having consistently good performance, particularly among private equity players. This is the view of Mark O’Hare, the founder and chief executive of Preqin. Speaking to more than 450 investors and managers in Australia and New…

Short and long-term factors are benefitting investors and their managers which have either entered the private markets space or expanded their capabilities. To the chagrin of detractors, Australia’s big not-for-profit funds can hang their hats largely on private markets for much of their outperformance. We all know UK based global manager Schroders is very old,…

The case for venture capital as an institutional investment has never been more apparent. As others in the private markets generally are saying, “where else are you going to invest?” While a new model doesn’t make it any easier for Australia’s big funds to invest locally, it does so globally. The new model consists of…

Insurance-linked securities and catastrophe (cat) bonds have become increasingly popular investments for institutional investors over the last 20 or-so years, since the market took off due to a spate of hurricanes in the US. COVID-19 has added a new twist. There may now be a capacity problem. According to two complementary research notes by investment…

With rising insurance premiums and continued fears about the impact of climate change – and whether the world is reacting effectively enough – insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bonds are going through a growth spurt. The March market slump due to COVID-19, which weighed heavily on returns for the first quarter, enabled the asset class to…

The job of global custodians is about to get a lot more important as the spread of new technologies takes hold throughout the investment world. A recent paper by Northern Trust’s asset servicing arm ‘reimagines’ the investment world in 2030, looking at what a fully digital world is likely to involve. Over the last decade,…