Ninety One

Archie Hart from Ninety One speaks to James Dunn from The Inside Network for our IN60 series.

The free money era in which the transition to renewable energy could have been dirt cheap is over. But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world has a golden opportunity to get the job done.

A significant chunk of asset owners are certain that climate investing means lower returns. After a year like 2022, it might be tough to convince them otherwise.

Looking at the real-world consequences of ESG investments should boost risk-adjusted returns and avoid greenwashing. “Get to the nuts and bolts of the investment,” John Green advises super funds.

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…