Analysis

So much for the Chinese taking over Australian businesses. A special report from Link Group subsidiary Orient Capital says that investments from Chinese sovereign wealth funds and other institutions in ASX 200 companies has halved in the past five years. The latest report, ‘Ownership Trends in Australia’, is an update on a more fulsome version…

The NZ government could force the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), New Zealand’s largest institutional investor, to sell down about NZ$1 billion of fossil fuel-related investments, a parliamentary committee concluded last week. In a thinly veiled threat, the ‘Education and Workforce Committee‘ review of the ACC ethical investment policies says the NZ$45 billion (A$42 billion) fund…

by Greg Bright In an important and timely report published last week, Adviser Ratings, a research and advice firm which studies both individual financial advisors and the overall retail advice sector, has confirmed massive changes ahead. The changes will affect the whole super industry. The report, ‘Adviser Musical Chairs Report’, says that total advisor numbers…

Value is poised for a major comeback that could “generate some of the best returns in a quarter century”, according to a recent research paper by US quantitative and multi-asset shop, QMA. The study, published last month, says value stocks have been heavily beaten down over the last 18 months despite underlying fundamentals that belie…

As most psychologists will say: you should fret only about things which you can influence. For super funds and their managers, that tends to be about costs rather than revenue. The big costs are tax and implementation costs. They may be problematic, but they are at least under your control. According to a new paper…

Ausbil Investment Management has become the first Australian company to sign the landmark ‘Investor Declaration on Plastic Pollution’. The global declaration pledges to find solutions to the worldwide problem through corporate commitments, programs and policies. MÃ¥ns Carlsson-Sweeny, the head of ESG research at Ausbil, said: “This is an active engagement approach with the major users of plastic…

by Greg Bright In the rapidly developing world of class actions, involving recovery of losses by investors and other affected parties, recent trends are impacting the industry. Here are some of them. With more cases being brought before the courts, in Australia and elsewhere, Financial Recovery Technologies (FRT), a global firm which specialises in shareholder…

BGL Corporate Solutions, a leading developer of ASIC corporate compliance and SMSF administration software and systems, is “incredibly concerned” by ASIC’s ‘Are SMSFs for you?’ letter to self-managed fund trustees. In a statement last week, on October 24, Ron Lesh, BGL’s managing director, said: “The document, in our opinion, contains numerous calculation and logic errors….

by Chris Bedingfield* The world has changed dramatically for asset managers in the past decade. For those who believe they have something different to offer the market, it has perhaps never been harder to start up on their own. From super funds insourcing their asset management capabilities, to the chicken-and-egg circle of research houses who…

by Greg Bright Ken Marshman, the independent chair of Rest, called them the ‘matchmaker’, ‘the fiancé’ and ‘Muriel’. They are three people who have been involved in no less than 13 super fund mergers. In the current climate, their experiences should be noted by all funds. Marshman, also a former chief executive of JANA Investment…

Global financial market infrastructure firm Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has laid out a chapter-and-verse governance model for the nascent blockchain universe. In a just-published white paper produced with consultancy giant, Accenture, DTCC establishes eight commandments for running ‘permissioned’ blockchains – also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). Unlike the headline-grabbing blockchain antics of…

by David Chaplin* Later this year, probably, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) of New Zealand will release the findings of a long-awaited review of the country’s custody sector. Securities servicing, as it should be known, has been long neglected by the NZ regulator. The review – understood to have been outsourced to consultancy firm PwC…