Russia

The bias towards investing in domestic securities and the complexity of the local benchmarks mean the impact investing conversation is “very advanced” Down Under, according to global asset manager Ninety One.

The $14 billion industry fund is in hot water over allegations its member money is exposed to companies that should have been screened out and that it held on to Russian stocks despite saying it had dumped them.

The big headwind to the emerging markets is fading. But buying big stories about growth and shuffling money from one hot sector to another is no way to play them.

Pandemics, invasions, and the return of inflation. If the last few years have shown investors anything, it’s that outrageous predictions can often be anything but.

The war on ESG rages anew after a rollercoaster 2022, but its detractors won’t win the fight. And as ESG matures, the future of passive index-tracking strategies is shaky.

Australia’s superannuation funds are now parking member money further and further away from their old backyard. But a more divisive world presents them with challenges they’ve not faced before. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the opening of ASFA’s 2022 conference was dominated by conversations usually reserved for the war room. The rapid divestment from Russia –…

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…

A “dramatic and sobering” first quarter has seen institutions re-think everything from ESG to hedge funds as the job of investing becomes harder in a more dangerous world. Recent surveys of global institutions have unearthed an increasingly gloomy outlook from our biggest investors as they scrutinise the new inflation paradigm and a more multi-polar geopolitical…

Regulators won’t be able to scrub out environmental, social and governance (ESG) ‘greenwashing’ in the investment industry, according to influential US finance academic, Aswath Damodaran. In a blistering attack on the ESG investing sector last month, Damodaran says greenwashing – or falsely marketing funds as sustainable (or the like) – is an indelible feature of…

Quantitative investment management has undergone a massive lift in profile in recent years, largely due to the rise of ETFs and smart-beta strategies. But the ‘new quants’, as they are being called, are going much further than that. While hardly new to the space, Harindra (Harin) de Silva, a lead portfolio manager at Allspring Global…