Analysis

Super funds and other asset owners are adapting to the lingering impact of the pandemic through a big jump in manager searches, according to the latest quarterly report from bfinance. The global fund search and advisory firm has reported a 34 per cent increase in the number of searches in 2020 compared with 2019, with…

The world’s major pension systems enjoyed their strongest year, last year, for growth compared to GDP, since 1998. The bad news, of course, is that the average 11.2 per cent rise for many countries this helped by stalling or falling GDP. The annual ‘Global Pension Assets Study, 2021’ from the Thinking Ahead Institute based in…

Index providers should face the same regulatory hurdles as investment managers, a new US legal paper argues. In the US, plain-vanilla indexers are regarded as information ‘publishers’. The University of Virginia School of Law (UVS) report says most index providers are de facto ‘investment advisers’ – a term under US law that includes fund managers…

One in five Australian institutional investors has terminated a fund manager where ESG factors have been a “primary or major factor” in the decision, according to a survey by bfinance, the global research and institutional advisory business. A further 41 per cent of those Australian investors surveyed said that, while not the main reason for…

The switch in focus to retirement incomes, ahead of the introduction of the Retirement Income Covenant, was evident at the annual SMSF Association conference last week. Deborah Ralston said: “Super has been a bit overdone”. Ralston, one of the panellists on the Government’s Retirement Income Review (RIR), which handed down its report in July 2020,…

If APRA wants to continue to encourage super fund mergers the regulator needs to make some changes to how it goes about its approvals process, according to one chief executive who is going through the process of having a successor fund transfer (TFR). Speaking at last weeks’ annual ASFA conference (on February 11), Leeanne Turner,…

Amundi Asset Management, Europe’s largest fund manager, has launched two strategies to build on its ESG-related offerings, a European equities and US equities fund, both of which focus on companies which are improving their ESG credentials. The three points of differentiation with the new funds are: an exclusion policy covering companies which sit outside the…

Lifecycle strategies have some problems. One, is how they compare their performance. Two, is how they explain their asset allocation. And three is whether they really fit APRA’s regulatory definition for a MySuper default fund. Alex Dunnin, the executive director of research at Rainmaker Research, who has been studying lifecycle products for the several years…

Aware Super is re-thinking its international exposures, particularly relating to China, and how it manages them as it expects they will continue to grow in importance within the $130 billion fund’s overall portfolio. “We haven’t taken any money out [of China] but as a minority investor we just think we should pause at the moment,”…

One would expect the inventors of the RAFI index to apply fundamental research to their work. When they turn to something as ephemeral as cryptocurrencies, the results are also entertaining. The Research Affiliates Fundamental Index (RAFI) is the strategy which kick-started the smart-beta trend; the best-known strategy developed by California-based manager Research Affiliates in 2005….

While all high-growth markets, such as many emerging markets, tend to disappoint equity market investors over long periods, China is a standout, according to Gerard Minack. The country is ‘the world’s best practice dilutor” of capital, he says. It’s the dilution of share capital, because of China’s allocation of capital through high levels of investment,…

The ASX is not Wall Street. A lot of the recent discussion about a style rotation, at long last, putting the value back in value investing, has focussed on the behaviour of US and global markets. A clearer focus on Australia offers a more nuanced, and relevant, analysis. According to a blog posted last week…