Ninety One

Institutional funds and their managers tend not to talk about tactical bets, at least not in public. It’s a long-term game after all. But there are times when short-term opportunities can also match long-term strategies. Take China, for instance.

Ninety One is relatively cautious on emerging markets from a top-down perspective, preferring bottom-up selection in a complex global environment, which we see as having distinct winners and losers.

Investors and their fund managers have dumped Russian holdings in recent weeks amid worsening horror at the invasion of Ukraine. But active managers could lessen the blow for investors through new opportunities on the other side of a Russian trade. For Ninety One’s emerging markets team, Russia is an “ugly sideshow” to the main investment…

The “hard asset mantra” is rising to a fever pitch in an inflationary environment, but investors should be “skeptical of historical analogies.” Inflation over the coming decade is expected to be closer to the experience of the 2000s than the 2010s, ending a paradigm that has underpinned an “unusually long bull market for stocks” and…

Some “Tiger-ish confidence” is warranted for China investors as regulatory upheaval eases and authorities target economic growth and stability. “After roaring back from the initial COVID outbreak, the Chinese economy has been through a more difficult spell,” writes Ninety One in its latest China report, titled “Tiger, Tiger: What investors can expect in the Chinese…

With COP26 a turning point in net-zero thinking, at least for investors and managers, Ninety One has expressed concern over insufficient focus on ‘real world decarbonisation’. The global multi-asset and specialist manager is presenting its 2022 investment outlooks presentation, ‘The Challenges of Normalisation’, this week (from December 6). In it, Hendrik du Toit, Ninety One’s…

One clear message from this month’s COP26 climate meeting is that big investors – especially Australian investors – will not be waiting for politicians to lead the way with a response to the crisis. Institutional investors are now “moving to the point of implementation” of their sustainability strategies, according to global manager Ninety One, with…

In a positive sign for diversified global managers, the dual-listed Ninety One has reported a turnaround in fund flows and a big increase in profits following strong returns in the past six months. The company said in London last week (November 16) that net inflows of £3.9 billion sterling (A$7.2 billion), taking total assets under…

If super fund investment staff didn’t appreciate the importance of indices prior to the introduction of YFYS, they should do now. With fixed income, the indices tell an interesting, and in some ways counterintuitive, story. Notwithstanding the continued popularity of absolute returns-based portfolios, especially with the end investors, the new fund performance test implemented by…

Global manager Ninety One has launched an index for sovereign bond investors which provides an independently verified assessment of alignment with the Paris Agreement on net zero. A feature of the index, the first of its kind, is that its inclusion of all major emerging markets, many of which are most impacted by both climate…