Investment News

The industry-owned Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the post-trade infrastructure for much of the global financial services industry, has announced its ‘Margin Transit Utility’ (MTU) community has grown to 50 firms representing thousands of ‘credit support annexes’ (CSAs). Users include dealer and buy-side organisations around the world. Given recent and continuing market volatility, as… [Read More…]

Global indexing giant MSCI will migrate to the Microsoft cloud under a deal inked last week. According to a release, the “strategic alliance” would see MSCI shift its “existing products, data and services” to the Microsoft Azure platform in stages beginning with the index and analytics solutions. MSCI would later transition its full suite of… [Read More…]

Veteran AMP Capital NZ bond manager, Warren Potter, has resigned after 14 years with the Wellington-based business to join the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) fund. In a note to clients, AMP Capital head of fixed income, Vicky Hyde-Smith, said Potter was hired by the $45 billion ACC fund as global futures portfolio manager – a… [Read More…]

The NZX-listed Smartshares funds saw traded value more than triple year-on-year in the first half of 2020. According to bespoke figures supplied by the NZX, over $1.2 billion of Smartshares exchange-traded funds (ETF) units changed hands in the six months to June 30 compared to just $360 million in the same period last year –… [Read More…]

Consultancy firm Melville Jessup Weaver (MJW) has added three locally owned schemes to its KiwiSaver quarterly reporting roster after they breached the billion-dollar barrier. As of the just-published June quarter MJW investment survey, Generate ($1.9 billion), Simplicity ($1.1 billion) and the NZX-owned SuperLife ($1 billion) all appear among the KiwiSaver rankings. “This recognises that the… [Read More…]

BlackRock institutional investors piled out of index fixed income strategies en masse during the June quarter in favour of an active approach to the asset class. According to the just-released BlackRock June quarter results, institutional investors withdrew a net US$10.7 billion from index fixed income funds while adding almost US$5 billion to active bond strategies…. [Read More…]

Disclosure of commissions could be one of the major challenges for financial advisers in new regulations laid down by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) last month, according to compliance specialist, Steven Burgess. Burgess, Compliance Refinery director, said while the final disclosure regulations bring much-needed clarity, financial adviser businesses would have to take… [Read More…]

NZ financial market participants remain in a marginal risk-on mood despite a record run-up in prices, a new Harbour Asset Management survey has found. The inaugural Harbour survey found 40 per cent of the 80 respondents would recommend adding riskier assets to portfolios with the remainder almost equally split between doing nothing and pulling back…. [Read More…]

UBS Wealth Management last week (July 17) launched its annual ‘Global Family Office Report’ for 2020. The big fund manager and global bank surveyed principals and executives in 121 single-family offices around the world. Those family offices handle an average total family wealth of US$1.6 billion. This represents a significantly larger dataset than that of… [Read More…]

NZ charitable organisation trustees are slowly tuning in to the impact investment trend that has gone prime-time offshore, according to the head of the country’s largest specialist fund in the sector. Bill Murphy, Purpose Capital Impact Fund (PCIF) executive director, said the concept was gathering ground in NZ, especially in philanthropic and charitable investing circles…. [Read More…]