News

Almost half of the top 500 global fund manager brands have disappeared in the last decade, the latest Thinking Ahead Institute annual review of the sector has found. A total of 232 names on the 2009 list of 500 largest asset managers were not on the 2019 list. Pre-dating the COVID-19 crisis, the Thinking Ahead…

The United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment, the global organisation representing about 3,300 pension funds and fund managers, has upgraded its presence in Australia with the appointment of a head of Australia and New Zealand. Sheela Veerappan was appointed to the vacant role in October, after having joined PRI in 2019 as a relationship manager…

Brookvine, an Australasian distribution partner for offshore and Australian fund managers, which tends to specialise in non-traditional investment offerings, has signed up a US-based global quant macro manager, Welton Global. Welton’s global macro strategy has had strong returns for a long period but really showed what it can do in the sudden global downturn across…

Brian Delaney, the soon-to-retire executive director at QIC, has had only four jobs in his career, but he managed to turn his first one, as a professional basketball player, into a central part of his family’s life. His two daughters – Alex, 25, and Bree, 22, are still playing, while his wife Gail, a former…

With an uptick in fund manager searches and increasing interest in its fee benchmarking service, bfinance has recruited a former fixed income manager, Daniele Goldberg, as a client consultant for its Sydney office. She joins Frithjof van Zyp, senior director, and part-time consultant Gerard Parlevliet, covering Australia for manager search and implementation, performance monitoring, risk…

Companies are increasingly making low-carbon investments, not only to reduce emissions and costs, but also to take advantage of revenue opportunities. When you step back and look at what’s required to reach the targets already set, massive disruption and investment means major business opportunities. The 189 parties to the Agreement, which took effect in November…

Marisa Hall sees recent world events as they impact on investors as well as much of society as a two-act play. The first act is where the action is – all of it bad news – and the second act is where all players come together to fix the problem. Hall, the co-head of the…

One of the great unanswerable questions for investors over the past 10 years is why value investing, the tried-and-true performer since it was identified in the 1930s but probably used innately well before, has stayed out of whack for so long. The chorus bemoaning value’s plight just gets louder and louder. But there are signs…

The NZ$4.2 billion (A$3.9 billion) New Zealand Government Superannuation Fund has replaced two of its global equities mandates with two Australian-domiciled global equity products, ahead of an independent review of its strategy. According to its 2020 annual report, post balance date, the Government fund (GFS) terminated Marathon and PanAgora contracts and appointed two Australian-based global…

The name’s Peterson. Ian Peterson. For many years, Ian Peterson was the toast of the art galleries of Britain, Europe, and the US. The quiet self-effacing businessman got to rub shoulders with the glitterati of the art world in London, Paris, and New York. Galleries queued up to borrow his works. He built a reputation…

Jacki Ellis, portfolio manager for retirement strategies at Aware Super, says she is passionate about issues relating to retirement. The big challenge for the industry is to engage with members earlier to make retirement seem “real”. Speaking last week (October 15) at the first of a series of webinars by Women in Super (WIS), called…

In a mixed response to last week’s federal Budget (February 6) the superannuation and associated sectors were generally supportive of the Government’s goals but almost universally concerned about how certain proposals would work and the likelihood of unintended adverse consequences. On a macro level there was no significant political divide, with consensus being that the…