Analysis

The Your Future Your Super (YFYS) performance test will likely harm ESG outcomes, but funds are increasingly considering impact as a sustainable investment weapon of choice. It’s unseasonably cold weather in the Gold Coast, as anybody on the street will tell you. Their winter is supposed to be a month away, but the puffer jackets…

Half-way through the MAX and Investment Leadership awards for 2022, the audience was silenced by researcher and co-organiser Alex Dunnin. He said: ‘Life has caught up with us.” His forecasts were chilling. “The investment world has changed entirely,” he said. Now, we are on track to see 9 per cent inflation by the end of…

A significant chunk of global financial markets is at risk in a carbon constrained future. But while recent events have diverted attention from the transition, sustainability shouldn’t be on the backburner. The transition to renewables is chugging along, though some investors have been happy to resume their flirtation with fossil fuels in the aftermath of…

Hostplus is navigating the current market upheaval – and a murky future – by pumping more money into unlisted assets. But despite a gloomy outlook, the “innovation genie” isn’t going anywhere. “Central banks are clearly behind the game here… and they’re trying to manage higher rates against a backdrop of pretty difficult markets,” Hostplus deputy…

Your Future, Your Super (YFYS) is the ultimate blunt instrument, and super will be glad to see it tweaked. But perhaps the bigger debate is around the future use of another blunt instrument: exclusion. If recent market moves are any determinant, it’s the exclusionary funds that will suffer most under the YFYS performance test, by…

In the past, institutional investors have been accused of being too trigger happy when it comes to manager underperformance. But a new study has found they actually find it hard to let go. A team of researchers surveyed 218 global institutional investors representing US$4.1 trillion in assets under management through data gathered by the Institutional…

The conventional view of emerging markets is that they represent a growth strategy and are prone to short-term fluctuations. A focus on the majority of stocks which pay dividends challenges that view. Even for long-term institutional investors there lingers a scepticism about emerging markets in general and the dominant position China plays in the current…

China is a little ahead of the US in the current re-pricing of global equities. That, coupled with western geopolitical concerns, has presented a new round of opportunities. According to Alison Shimada, the lead portfolio manager (PM) for Allspring Global’s Total Equity Emerging Markets team, based in San Francisco, the China region stocks do not…

The last few months have several famed investors convinced that the bull market is dead and buried. But how it came to life in the first place bears examining. “Raging bull markets are examples of mass hysteria,” writes Oaktree Capital co-founder Howard Marks in his latest missive to investors large and small. “At the extreme,…

Wildly anomalous times are giving rise to a new inflationary paradigm, and Lazard’s Ron Temple has climate change, mitigation risk, and equity duration on his mind. “The challenge here for the Fed is that we have price increases that are outpacing wage increases; rent increases that are accelerating; and the worry that workers don’t go…

Inflation is making a latter day comeback, and a financial system “sanitized by 15 years of free money” is totally unprepared. It’s time, once again, for tough medicine. Inflation hasn’t been this high in 40 years, but investors have become convinced that central banks can still tamp it down it with relative ease – a…

One of the Coalition’s few surviving  “super soldiers”, Andrew Bragg has called on his party to go further down the route of “flexibilising” super – if not abolishing it completely. Senator Andrew Bragg finds himself in a curious position following Labor’s election win. He’s one of the few super partisans to survive the teal clean…