Nearly every Australian has super, but its settings don’t work for every Australian, according to the First Nations Foundation, which is advocating for changes around estate planning and the preservation age to make the system fairer.
Betting against acts of God is a great way to make money, but institutional allocations to natural catastrophe reinsurance have stayed relatively static even as some managers are generating double-digit uncorrelated returns.
Eight IP picks up Colonial small-cap mandate
Kerry Series
Eight Investment Partners (8IP) has doubled the size of its Australian small-cap funds with the confirmation last week of a $55 million mandate from Colonial First State – the firm’s first institutional investor.
8IP was established in 2009 by Kerry Series, a co-founder of Perennial Investment Partners and former head of Asia Pacific equities at AMP Capital. He and other staff bought out the majority shareholder in the firm, South Africa’s Sanlam, in March last year. Sanlam had earlier purchased small-cap manager Atom Funds Management, with 8IP rebranding that fund in 2012.
Series said last week the Colonial mandate represented a milestone for the firm, which had until recently attracted mainly high-net-worth investors.
The mandate will be co-managed by Series and another principal, Stephen Walsh.
8IP aims to identify three types of companies in its research: ‘stars’, ‘turnarounds’ and under-researched stocks, Series said. The three-year average return for the small-cap strategy is 17.4 per cent net of fees.
