Investment News

Nikko Asset Management has converted a long-standing NZ equities socially responsible investment (SRI) institutional strategy into a retail-ready fund. The new SRI Equity Fund feeds into a local shares portfolio the manager has run for about 20 years, according to Nikko NZ chief, George Carter. Carter said the SRI fund – available as a single… [Read More…]

Boston-headquartered investment firm, MFS, has named James Langlands as head of wholesale for Australia and NZ to replace Ross Cartwright. Langlands, who previously served a similar role for BNP Paribas Asset Management in Australia, takes on point-man duties for the MFS product range available to advisers, private wealth managers and other wholesale clients in the… [Read More…]

Custody faces a looming identity crisis as finance morphs further into digital form, according to a new State Street paper. The article, included in the first ominbus report published by the recently formed State Street Digital, says traditional custodial practices will come under pressure as the digital asset transition continues apace. Penned by Swen Werner… [Read More…]

Chalk one up for the old guys: a new study has found that, where funds management is concerned, age is correlated with both performance and persistence. “The most consistent result from our estimates of the cross-sectional relationship between manager characteristics and manager skill… are that accumulated wisdom, however this is proxied, has a positive relationship… [Read More…]

Global companies have made some progress to achieving workplace gender equality despite a still male-dominated upper echelon, a new Bloomberg study reveals. The seventh annual Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index (GEI) published last week found females represented about a third of board members on average among the 418 firms reporting data. Just 7 per cent of women… [Read More…]

Early data from multi-choice KiwiSaver scheme, InvestNow, shows most members have diversified beyond a single manager while mixing active, passive and responsible investment options. InvestNow founder, Anthony Edmonds, said over two-thirds of the firm’s KiwiSaver scheme members have selected more than one underlying fund among the 35 available options. “On average our members have three… [Read More…]

Another retail-focused share-trading service hit the NZ streets last week as the derivatives and forex broker, BlackBull Markets rolled out a customised version of the US-based Interactive Brokers (IB) platform for local investors. The deal opens up more than 80 markets and over 23,000 listed companies for online consumption by NZ investors, according to Caleb… [Read More…]

Investors will need to adopt careful sector and stock-by-stock selection strategies to navigate the coming year as regime-changing conditions continue to favour shares over bonds, according to the latest Salt Funds Management analysis. The Salt ‘Global Outlook’ published last week says while share markets may deliver annual returns in 2022 in tune with the long-term… [Read More…]

Jeremy Grantham believes the “superbubble” he’s been warning about for years is now on the brink of collapse – and that the “wild rumpus” can begin at any time. Calling the collapse of a market bubble is anybody’s game. One needs only to know that it exists – something now patently obvious to any investor… [Read More…]

AMP Capital private markets spin-off plan moved a step closer to fruition last week with the appointment of Nadine Lennie as inaugural chief financial officer (CFO) of the embryonic entity. Lennie – former CFO of Afterpay (now part of Block) – joins the AMP Capital PrivateMarketsCo pre-launch vehicle in April from global toll-road giant, Atlas… [Read More…]