News

by Greg Bright When Research Affiliates set up an Australasian office in mid-2018, it probably knew it would cause a stir. It agreed for Australian Mike Aked to go home to Melbourne to set up the new business. He is country head and head of research and strategy. He was the former head of asset…

Some of the best investment strategies have their genesis in personal circumstances or adversity. For Martin Currie, which manages one of Australia’s oldest and best performing equity income strategies, it was both. The firm last month celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Martin Currie Australia Equity Income strategy, which accounts for more than $6 billion…

by David Chaplin The big Netherlands-headquartered investment performance attribution firm, Ortec Finance, has completed the double in both Australia and New Zealand, landing the two largest institutional funds in each country as clients. It picked up NZ’s Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) fund late last month. Another big Australian fund is set to follow. The ACC…

by Wietske Blees* Making well-informed investment decisions isn’t easy at the best of times but throw in a pandemic and a decade worth of quantitative easing that’s fuelling a growing disconnect between equity markets and underlying fundamentals, and reliably predicting future growth prospects becomes a significant challenge. A recent ‘Leading Minds’ webcast hosted by Fund…

Ian Perkins, a long-time executive and entrepreneur in asset servicing in Australia and Asia, spending the past six years at BNP Paribas Securities Services in Sydney, died suddenly of a heart attack on Sunday June 29, age 57, while at home with his family. Friends at BNP Paribas prepared a short personal tribute which concluded:…

Brendan Burwood has just one more task ahead of him now. That is to negotiate an exit for shareholders in the listed shell of the former Chant West Holdings and end a corporate saga which started when the software customisation company Enzumo Ltd acquired the business of fund research company Chant West in December 2015….

The $9 billion profit-for-members Australian Catholic Superannuation & Retirement Fund has appointed the specialist implementation manager Parametric Portfolio Associates to run a mandate as part of the ‘RetireSmart’ strategy for a new custom-designed equities approach with a focus on capital retention and income. Parametric will manage the equity portfolio as part of Australian Catholic Super’s…

Fund manager business risks have spiked upwards during the coronavirus crisis with further fall-out likely as the shockwaves reverberate, according to a new paper by Mercer. The firm sees the possibility of casualties and M&A activity, but not yet a widespread collapse of funds management firms. The ‘Riders on the storm’ report, authored by David…

Culture is a “fascinating subject dripping with issues”, according to Roger Urwin, who first wrote about the power of culture for fiduciary investors and their managers in the 1990s, having established the asset consulting arm of Willis Towers Watson in 1989. He remains one of the most influential advisors to big funds in the world….

While an estimated four out of five big international investors, including Australian super funds, gain their China equities exposures through emerging markets (EM) strategies and funds, a new study by bfinance, the global research and mandates search firm, says that a single-country exposure to China is likely to deliver the best results. More big investors…

‘Week in China’, the HSBC-backed free weekly newsletter about investments, business and life in general on the mainland of China, celebrated its 500th issue late last month. Steve Irvine, founding editor, said: “When we were looking back it struck us that while we have talked about many of the key elements of China’s long history,…

There are lots of repercussions from the COVID-19 fallout which will stick for a long time for everyone, including managers of Australian equities. For the most part, according to Paul Xiradis, talking about the equities markets recently, they are more an acceleration of previous trends – either demographic or societal. Putting aside the daily Coronavirus…