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(Pictured: Connie Mckeage) OneVue has capitalized on its recent IPO already and will expand its outsource offering to include a responsible entity service following the purchase of Select Asset Management. Select, which was established in 2002 as a fund-of-funds manager covering alternative as well as mainstream asset classes, has also developed the RE business – Select…

(Pictured: Justine O’Connell) Frontier Advisors has brought its senior consultants team to 10 with the promotion of Justine O’Connell, a specialist in fixed interest and cash. The firm has also appointed a new associate consultant and recruited a new analyst. O’Connell first joined Frontier in 2005 but left in 2008 to take up a role at…

(Pictured: Pru Bennett) by Greg Bright The influential proxy voting and governance consulting firms are becoming increasingly involved in the push for greater board diversity at public companies, with one of them saying it will vote against the chair, if necessary, to sway boards to introduce women directors. The trend in Australia for greater diversity, as…

(Pictured: Ding Xuedong) There is always a bit of excitement surrounding the publication of the China Investment Corporation annual report. The CIC, after all, is not the most transparent of organisations. It now oversees US$652 billion, almost two-thirds of which is invested outside China, primarily through external managers. Hence the excitement. Headline numbers for the report,…

(Pictured: Denis Carroll) Investing for risk can add real value to portfolios over time, with a recent paper based on a time series of live decisions for a UK-based fiduciary investor, showing significant outperformance by adopting a risk-control target rather than returns. The paper, by consulting group CheckRisk, followed the implementation of its advice at IFG,…

(Pictured: Kimon Kouryialas) Martin Currie, the Edinburgh-based global manager, is to integrate the Australian equities business of Legg Mason in a deal announced in the UK last night. The deal involves Martin Currie becoming a wholly owned affiliate of Legg Mason. Kimon Kouryialas, Martin Currie’s director of Pan Asia sales and client service, said completion of…

(Pictured: Indy Karlekar) The adoption of a responsible property investing (RPI) strategy will reduce operating costs and increase operating income as well as asset values over the medium term, according to Indy Karlekar, the managing director, global research and strategy, for Principal Global Investors. Karlekar was in Australia last week for a CIE conference, where he…

Students of ancient history will remember leafing through text books and coming across the term ‘Pax Romana’, Latin for the Roman peace referring to the calm experienced across the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Markets and economies now appear to be living through the Pax Central Banker age. The US Federal Reserve…

(Pictured: Malcolm Johnson) by David Chaplin Mercer has lost one of its largest New Zealand investment consulting gigs, dumped in favour of Russell Investments by the NZ$500 million plus Universities Superannuation Scheme. The move will see the Universities scheme transition to a Russell implemented consulting solution over the next few months. It is understood that this…

Passive investing is the fastest growing style of investing in the money management industry, according to London Stock Exchange Group, and is tipped to rise from 11 per cent of total funds in 2012 to 22 per cent in 2020. At the LSE analyst briefing following the Russell takeover announcement on June 26, LSE chief…

(Pictured: Paul Khoury) A surprisingly high proportion of Australian fund managers believe that the next 12 months presents an increased opportunity to make acquisitions and a good part of this is being driven by offshore aspirations, according to a global survey by State Street. The State Street survey of 300 senior executives of asset management firms,…

(Pictured: Craig Lazzarra) by Penny Pryor Superannuation funds should be benchmarking their performance to equal-weighted benchmarks instead of cap-weighted benchmarks, according to an S&P Dow Jones Indices (SPDJI) report. An equal-weighted index will give equal weighting to each stock within an index, whereas a cap-weighted index will have equivalent allocations to the stocks depending on…