News

EY has promoted Rita Da Silva as its new ‘Oceania wealth and asset management leader’, effective from this Wednesday (April 1.) She replaces Antionette Elias, who is moving to a tax leader role for EY Oceania Financial Services. In the role, Da Silva will be responsible for leading EY teams of more than 400 wealth…

by Justin Hale and Joseph Grenny* These days it’s hard to get people to pay attention in any meeting, but when people aren’t in the same room, it can be especially difficult. And it’s particularly annoying when you make a nine-minute argument, pause for an expected reaction, and get: “I’m not sure I followed you”,…

by Greg Bright In 2008, with the global financial crisis gathering pace, a handful of countries, including Australia, banned short selling. This was later admitted by regulators, such as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the UK’s former FSA, to have been a mistake. Hedge fund managers, and a few other groups, were at the…

J.P. Morgan, Australia’s largest securities services firm, has told several of its direct sub-custody clients that they need to look elsewhere for another provider. The biggest of these, Clearstream, is already going to tender. This doesn’t happen too often, but it happens, and reflects the intricate nature of the asset servicing business. J.P. Morgan Securities…

It’s not about the catastrophes themselves, which are bad in all respects, including for the insurance companies. It’s about how certain specialist fund managers enable their client super funds to trade in the risks and provide an enhanced bond-like yield. The specialist fund managers buy underlying investments which have nothing to do – uncorrelated –…

The world’s biggest venture capital managers did more deals last year, but their average value was lower than the year before, a report from GlobalData says. The report indicates a “more cautious approach by the managers”. Six of the top 10 global venture capital (VC) investors showcased year-on-year (YoY) growth in the number of investments,…

Some of the world’s largest and most influential investors are increasing the pressure on the world’s largest social media companies to do more to prevent “objectionable” content spreading across their platforms in the wake of the March 15, 2019, terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Following the attack, more than 100 global investors representing about…

Implementing carbon-lite policies has added about 0.3 per cent per annum to the NZ$43 billion (A$42 billion) NZ Superannuation Fund (NZS) performance, according to chief executive, Matthew Whineray. Whineray told the recent Finance and Expenditure Select Committee during the annual NZS review that the “portfolio is 30bps per year better off, which is, we’ll call…

by David Chaplin It was like BT in its heyday; BT when BT was Bankers Trust.  But if the Auckland leg of the Magellan Australasian roadshow was a blast of nostalgia for funds industry veterans it also marked an end point. Magellan is the best at these things. It will be sad to see them…

Ray Dalio, the famed hedge fund manager who founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975, has done a backflip on his initial view of the damage to be caused by coronavirus. He now says it will cost US companies about US$4 trillion (A$6.9 trillion) and the wider world perhaps US$12 trillion. The US$160 billion manager, still controlled…

by Greg Bright A move away from the reliance on traditional strategic asset allocation as the overarching strategy for big investors and towards the use of a ‘total portfolio approach’, will deliver an additional return of between 0.5 and 1.0 per cent a year, according to new research. Roger Urwin, Global Head of Investment Content…

Tim Hodgson, the co-founder, with Roger Urwin, of the ‘Thinking Ahead Institute’ in 2015 -which is sponsored and overseen by Willis Towers Watson – gave big investors a lot to think about last week with respect to climate change. It’s scary for us individuals and also scary for investment professionals. Hodgson led the annual Thinking…