Analysis

Amidst more reports of the death of the traditional 60/40 portfolio, investors will need to shift towards alternatives to make up the shortfall. It’s time for investors to move heavily into alternatives, according to Evergreen Consultants. Angela Ashton, the firm’s founder and director, says investors should explore the alternatives sector more broadly, including gold, commodities,…

A “dramatic and sobering” first quarter has seen institutions re-think everything from ESG to hedge funds as the job of investing becomes harder in a more dangerous world. Recent surveys of global institutions have unearthed an increasingly gloomy outlook from our biggest investors as they scrutinise the new inflation paradigm and a more multi-polar geopolitical…

A rising tide lifts all boats – but this one is starting to recede. After the post-Covid liquidity mania, the best of the best will have a chance to prove themselves once again. The world’s stock pickers have been in a rut these last few years. A phenomenal bull market has given them little chance…

Net-zero pledges on carbon emissions are everywhere – but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. We know that the vast majority of the ~37 billion tonnes of industrial carbon dioxide emitted annually comes from companies. But there’s still an enormous data gap at the company level for investors to truly understand the losers and…

There has been a saying in markets for the last few years that fixed-income investments, favoured for their guaranteed returns and correlation benefits, have actually become “fixed-loss.” The driving factor was the threat (and now, realisation) that bond yields and cash rates were set to turn higher, reversing a four-decade tailwind. Naturally, these types of…

Your Future Your Super (YFYS) will make super funds bigger and more risk averse – except when it doesn’t, according to a new report from J.P. Morgan Asset Management (JPMAM). The report, which follows J.P. Morgan’s inaugural survey of super fund executives, shows that CIOs are now adapting their investment strategies to the demands of…

While markets have so far shrugged off the inevitable rate rises, there’s plenty more to come – and the global outlook keeps getting gloomier. The Fed’s decision to unleash massive monetary stimulus in the early days of Covid-19 (and in nearly every economic crisis before it) ushered in a brief golden age for markets. But…

Investors will have to retune expectations in line with changing market harmonics, global consultancy firm Oliver Wyman notes in part three of a five-paper opus delivered earlier this year. Based on data covering a 150-year period, the Oliver Wyman series concludes that investors must turn to more sophisticated tools to appreciate the complex tones of…

The fight in Ukraine is unlikely to spill over into a shooting war between Russia and the NATO countries. That doesn’t mean impossible, and investors “should absolutely worry about unintended consequences.” For the last month or so, investors have been reading the entrails of a beast they’re broadly unfamiliar with – geopolitics – to determine…

Quantitative investment management has undergone a massive lift in profile in recent years, largely due to the rise of ETFs and smart-beta strategies. But the ‘new quants’, as they are being called, are going much further than that. While hardly new to the space, Harindra (Harin) de Silva, a lead portfolio manager at Allspring Global…

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that equity market returns are likely to be muted going forward. But salvation might arrive in the form of domestic activist strategies. “From a timing perspective, we think the forward-looking environment presents a much more challenging return outlook for equity investors given the extended low interest rate and bull market…

APRA’s orthodoxy on scale and its importance to funds has been disputed by all comers, with “massive and passive” a common refrain. But the regulator is hoping to prove that bigger really is better. One of the more controversial moments of Helen Rowell’s career as APRA’s superannuation executive was the claim that any fund below…