Analysis

Unrest in the Middle East, political dysfunction in Washington and the looming shadow of a global recession means markets face a new wall of worry in time for the holiday season.

Everybody’s worried that the world’s largest economy will suffer the same fate as Japan did when its asset price bubble collapsed in the late 80s. But, like it or not, China has one big advantage.

Big funds are looking for help with investment governance as they internalise more and more of their resources, according to JANA, and it’s also seeing a lot more demand for guidance on net zero objectives.

Not every risk is out in the open, and Allspring Global Investments is keeping a close eye on those that some segments of the market struggle to price – including a US government shutdown and a war on the Korean peninsula.

Too much of what managers call alpha is just a roll of the dice. To find the real stuff you have to look in private markets, according to Michael Block, while trend following strategies will get you something that looks just like it.

Uncertainty, dispersion and volatility are “magical words” for hedge funds, and the $160 billion Aware Super has reframed its thinking around the liquid alternatives space in a more complex macro environment.

The $1.7 trillion global investment manager PGIM has brought together its alternatives units in a sign of their growing importance to its biggest clients.

Calls to liquidate the Future Fund and use the proceeds to pay down government debt have grown louder in recent weeks but doing so won’t come without a cost according to analysis from WTW.

The latest iteration of the Your Future Your Super test has dispatched a large swathe of trustee-directed products even as APRA acknowledges that many are selected for reasons beyond performance.

Changing dynamics in the Australian asset management industry gave the Future Fund access to a manager it might ordinarily have been forced to walk away from, and it expects to find plentiful (and sustainable) alpha in small caps.

Valuations are never going to be “perfect”, but that doesn’t mean super funds shouldn’t be working harder to make them more accurate – and more intelligible to the people who really matter.

The Future Fund might make a bigger contribution to the budget if it was liquidated, according to the Centre for Independent Studies, which argues that its returns haven’t been that impressive even as its benchmark gets harder to beat.