Analysis

Surging equity markets have driven the Future Fund’s return higher, but its prediction that inflation will be stickier than expected has been born out and it “remains conscious of the potential for significant deterioration”.

Good investing requires real sacrifices, according to Oaktree’s Howard Marks, but you can’t expect to be compensated just for making them.

Australian super funds roundly beat their global peers on investment costs due to a combination of hardball negotiations around fees and savvy implementation in pricier asset classes.

Numbers might give you some comfort but they don’t tell the whole story, according to CFS. To get that, you have to dig a little deeper – and take a lot of meetings.

The International Monetary Fund has urged regulators to keep a close eye on private debt as the once obscure asset class enters the investment mainstream.

Sweeping technological change can upset the best laid plans of big institutional investors. But the way they deal with it is ad hoc, “hazardous” and distorts how they think a portfolio should behave.

Ruffer expects a sudden reversal in the smooth conditions that investors have enjoyed. The ubiquity of multi-strategy hedge funds, algorithmic market making and 0DTE options might make it much worse.

Every investor wants access to the private markets, and every manager – established or otherwise – wants to help them get it. But when there’s a “new product every day”, how many of them will be any good?

Big institutional investors need to make a “very compelling case” to go galloping off into trickier parts of the market. Gold is now offering one.

Super funds are an accumulation wonder of the world, but when it comes to retirement they’re in the same leaky boat as every other defined contribution system. BlackRock wants to bail it out.

TPA is an “uncommon and demanding” approach to running an investment organisation, according to the Future Fund, but a rewarding one – as long as institutions that take it up know that it’s not a transformation that should be embarked upon lightly.

The AUD$660 billion M&G has been a “sleeping beauty” down under, and it wants more than the mandate it already runs for the Future Fund. Thinking like an asset owner is part of the equation.