Analysis

Institutional investors are demanding more corporate disclosure on sustainability, remuneration and business strategy to guide proxy-voting decisions, a new global survey has found. In a release, Kiran Vasantham, Morrow Sodali director of investor engagement, said: “This survey provides issuers with valuable insights on investor expectations and voting policies.” Morrow Sodali is an international corporate governance advisory…

Jonathan Armitage, the CIO of MLC, will deliver the keynote address at this year’s AVCJ Private Equity and Venture Forum in Sydney, March 5-7. He has the timeless topic: ‘Global Investing in Turbulent Times: how are we positioning ourselves for the future?’ The Asian Venture Capital Journal reports on a short question and answer discussion…

The reporting season for ASX-listed companies which has started this month is shaping up as the most intriguing – and important – since the global financial crisis. Will sentiment and noise overshadow fundamental strength? Well known for his published analyses of the reporting by Australian companies and their pre-and-post reporting performance, Reece Birtles, the CIO…

Many big investors would be better off building their own diverse portfolio of hedge funds than using certain types of the many multi-asset strategies and products now on the market, according to a new paper by Mercer. The paper, ‘Making Sense of Multi-Asset’, focuses on two of the most popular of the four types of…

by David Chaplin The meteoric ascent of index-investing has yet to seriously distort financial markets and could, by contrast, spark new strategies for active managers, according to Mercer. In its thematic outlook for 2019, the firm says the investor index-rush has not, to date, cancelled out the ‘price discovery’ power of markets or created broader…

It’s the US versus the rest of the world in institutional investment management, new research from Fidelity Investments has found. The US is not as keen as almost all other countries on new technologies, new asset classes and socially responsible investing. The recently-published 11th annual Fidelity Institutional Asset Management global fund manager survey reveals a large…

Almost since indices were invented, primarily as a form of measurement, their power to influence the behaviour of market participants and therefore the whole market as defined by those indices has been well understood and sometimes criticised, particularly plain vanilla market-cap indices. But in the past five years this power has considerably weakened, according to…

Jeremy Grantham, 80, is all over the science of studying climate change and he doesn’t like what he sees. But, true to his famous fund manager roots, he is able to look at the investment implications and opportunities, while throwing some barbs at ostrich-like policy makers along the way. In a rare webinar for Australian…

by Greg Bright The proposed best-of-breed 10-manager panel to choose default funds plus forced amalgamation of funds which have underperformed for a period grabbed the headlines following the Productivity Commission’s final report on superannuation. For some practitioners this masks a missed opportunity. In 2011, when Bill Shorten, as minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, enacted…

Despite an end-of-year slowdown last quarter and lack of market price support for the year, Australia’s ETPs reached another record, up 13 per cent to $40.8 billion in total market cap in 2018. This was due solely to fund inflows. BetaShares is predicting an increase of between 22-34 per cent this year. Alex Vynokur, BetaShares…

Long the poor cousin of commercial and retail sectors of direct property, industrial – in particular warehouses – has been coming to the fore in the past couple of years, thanks to changing consumer buying patterns. Forget the old notion of a dusty warehouse. These are often new buildings, increasingly multi-storied, with robots in abundance….

The business case for diversity among corporates at board and management levels is compelling, according to Research Affiliates, but the investment case requires more work to measure the excess returns from having a culture that embraces diverse and dissenting views. The Californian-based smart-beta manager, which partners with others to implement its strategies, says in a…