Analysis

Last year a big super fund, Aware Super, shocked the M&A market in Australia with a surprise bid for a listed company, OptiComm. It signalled a new era in competition among players at the big end of town. It was the first time a super fund had tried to buy a whole listed company in…

The advent of Your Future Your Super (YFYS) and a new wave of climate regulation means institutional investors are increasingly turning their gaze towards decarbonisation, according to Northern Trust Asset Management. Scott Bennett, Northern Trust Asset Management head of quantitative research and client solutions for Australia and New Zealand, believes YFYS and other regulations have…

PIMCO, the world’s largest fixed income manager, believes that there is more risk in the current inflation bogey than the market is anticipating. It has published what is likely the most authoritative look at the current inflation concerns and suggested what investors should be doing about them. The PIMCO paper, ‘Assessing Inflation: Theories, Policies and…

Semiconductors are ‘the new oil’. The big problem is getting them. “What we’re seeing is an explosion in the amount of data gathering and measurement and functionality across whole swathes of industries,” says Matthew Reynolds, Capital Group investment director for Australia. “Chips are literally going into every device you can think of – not just…

bfinance, the global fund-manager search and research consultant, is moving into the wholesale wealth management sector, having completed its first global survey in the space. The survey of 120 wealth managers, including about 10 from Australia, shows a pattern of trends which are similar to those in the institutional market where bfinance has focused its…

The 88,000 members of Australian Catholic Superannuation and Retirement Fund (ACSRF) are about to be very confused. As are members of some other big super funds. Forty-year-old members in ACSRF’s default MySuper product, LifetimeOne, will be told they just earned an average 20.9 per cent from their super (after fees and taxes for the year…

Supported by record retail inflows, ESG-focused investing has, finally, become ‘the norm’, according to panelists at least two of the sessions at last week’s (August 31-September 2) AIST ASI conference. But one of the interesting, most recent, trends within this trend, is how climate change action and inaction has given a very short-term focus to…

In the past 10 months, since November last year, the investor’s decision on China has done a fully circle – from not whether to invest but how to invest, back to not how but whether. It was in November that the Chinese Government scuttled the US$37 billion IPO of Ant Group, the financial services affiliate…

As investors have looked to put more sizzle into their fixed interest portfolios for extra yield, a sector within the ESG universe has been, increasingly, providing just that – impact bonds. For big super funds the main game has been integration of ESG principles throughout portfolios, including fixed income, and whatever allocation they may have…

With equities and bonds both fully priced, investors are increasingly looking at alternative strategies. A new one, although difficult to access, is ‘greenfields infrastructure’. According to David Neal, the chief executive of IFM Investors and a former CIO and chief executive of the Future Fund, the conundrum for investors was well expressed by Stein’s Law…

AustralianSuper is no longer the underdog. The question is what becomes of the industry fund culture when industry funds “are the status quo”. As Australia’s first $200 billion+ megafund, AustralianSuper is no longer the upstart born of the 2006 merger of the Australian Retirement Fund (ARF) and the Superannuation Trust of Australia (STA). It’s also…

As a far-reaching regulatory crackdown rolls through Asian markets, Elizabeth Soon, portfolio manager for PineBridge, leans on one key lesson from her thirty years in equity markets: volatility brings opportunity. “People become fearful when markets fall and they sell, but they become fearless during a bull market even when valuations don’t justify it,” Soon says….