News

by Greg Bright Franklin Templeton announced its new leadership team last week, including the important Australasian and APAC parts of the business, prior to the official completion on July 31 of the takeover of Legg Mason, the global multi-affiliate manager. Now, the hard work begins. Multi-affiliate managers tend to be a different breed to traditional…

In a regular series of presentations on the state of play in their markets by its affiliated managers, GSFM has demonstrated the diversification advantages that multi-affiliate funds management businesses have over their single-manager counterparts. The aim, as obvious as it sounds, is to have more winners than losers at any particular time. Damien McIntyre, the…

Two studies published in the past month have shed light on both the latest rankings, by assets, and how Sovereign Wealth Funds are investing those assets. Unlike many big pension funds, there is a big disparity in the cultures of sovereign funds and their investment styles. The definition of ‘sovereign wealth fund’ could also be…

As the ‘S’ in ‘ESG’ is becoming increasingly important for big super funds and other fiduciary investors, the generally illegal activity known as ‘Modern Slavery’ in most countries, including Australia and New Zealand, has shown up the difficulties in finding out about and addressing bad behaviour down the supply chain. This is bad behaviour and…

Around every corner of Australia’s roughly $3 trillion in super industry assets, you’ll find a forecaster, says one of the industry’s leading researchers, Raewyn Williams. Investment teams forecast market direction, engagement teams forecast new member flows and finance teams forecast what seem to be the regulators’ favourite topic: fund fees and other costs. “But where…

Cbus Super’s new chief executive will be Justin Arter, a former Australia country head for BlackRock and a former UK head of institutional business for that manager. Perhaps more importantly for his new role, Arter is also a former chief executive of VFMC, the Victorian Government-owned manager, which has a similar culture to that of…

by David Chaplin Fintech enthusiasts have until this week to lob in an offer for the Australian and New Zealand arms of collapsed German online payments firm Wirecard. The company has been labelled the biggest failure for investors’ due diligence in recent memory, according to global due diligence specialist Castle Hall. It has the dubious…

Constructing a diversified portfolio of different managers and strategies requires an understanding of how each relates to the others in different market conditions. Strategies which cluster together, in terms of having a positive correlation, should receive a smaller allocation in a diversified portfolio than those which don’t cluster. Those which help diversification should be allocated…

Most investment firms seem to have transitioned fairly smoothly to working from home compared with a lot of other industries, and that goes for big asset consulting firms around the world as well as managers. But the consultants, like managers, have new problems to try to solve. Frontier Advisors and its two global research partners…

Until a few years’ ago, multi-asset managers were consistently delivering reliable returns with good downside awareness. However, from 2018 there was a noticeable shift towards persistent underperformance in relative-value multi-asset managers which was outside the range of expectations. Frontier Advisors has produced a paper analysing the shift in performance, underlying drivers and the way forward….

In times of crisis, robust fund governance is vital, according to Sarah Cornelius, a Frontier Advisors consultant. She quizzed two fiduciary investors and another Frontier consultant on governance issues during one of last week’s sessions at the annual Frontier conference (on July 21), held virtually over three weeks this year. They discussed the impact of…

Blue Orbit Asset Management, a new Melbourne-based boutique equities manager, has snared a highly regarded specialist chief operating officer, Lewis Bearman, to take on that role with the firm from next week, August 4. He has 34 years of experience as a COO at three major funds management firms. The new position follows the launch…