Investment News

FNZ has settled an acrimonious legal dispute with former leaders of its recently purchased US business, YieldX. In a filing with a New York district court early in April, FNZ “voluntarily dismisses this proceeding without prejudice” against YieldX founders, Adam Green and Shlomo Gross. The global platform provider sued Green and Gross at the beginning… [Read More…]

First Sentier’s decision to close a number of strategies and pivot towards private markets handily illustrates the pressures facing the Australian funds management scene – and the new period of competition into which it is now entering. The circa A$238 billion First Sentier will close four strategies and hand back A$14 billion to investors in… [Read More…]

The yet-to-be-fully-formed FirstCape has emerged as a potential buyer of a stake in Fisher Funds, according to press across the Tasman. National news publication, The Australian, reported earlier this month that the “newly merged JB Were and Jarden wealth manager backed by Pacific Equity Partners [PEP] is understood to have thrown its hat in the… [Read More…]

AMP has reported modest growth in NZ funds under management during the March quarter with investment markets doing the heavy-rowing. According to an AMP market update released last week, the NZ group saw net outflows (including newly categorised ‘pension payments’) of almost A$40 million over the first three months of 2024 across its KiwiSaver, superannuation… [Read More…]

Louise Unger is set to join the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) in June as permanent replacement for Paul Gregory, former executive director response and enforcement. Gregory resigned last December to take up a newly created role as head of investment partnerships for the ANZ NZ funds management shop. FMA general counsel and head of evaluation… [Read More…]

Heathcote Investment Partners founder, Clayton Coplestone, puts a modern perspective on portfolio construction for NZ financial advisers…   The art of creating truly personalised investment portfolios transcends mere paint-by-numbers asset allocation or join-the-dots product placement. Instead, portfolio construction is a highly skilled craft that demands financial advisers capture the essence of individual client preferences while… [Read More…]

Link Fund Solutions has been slammed one last time by the UK regulator for its part in the 2019 Woodford Equity Income Fund (WEIF) debacle that seriously harmed late-exiting investors from the liquidity-compromised vehicle. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) says in its final report on the Woodford affair published mid-April that only a parent company-funded… [Read More…]

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) laid out an ambitious moon-shot program to rocket the global financial system into unification and beyond. In a new paper published last week, the BIS proposes a worldwide reboot of finance built “on ecosystems interconnected with each other – much like the internet”. Unavoidably dubbed the ‘Finternet’ by report… [Read More…]

The lag is over. Most economies should, theoretically, now be feeling the full force of high interest rates that first lurched into a new rising cycle late in 2021. Nik Persic, Bentham Asset Management deputy chief investment officer, said the impact of interest rate hikes typically take 12-18 months to flow from the initial monetary… [Read More…]

Emerging markets (EM) have offered fertile ground for factor-based strategies, according to new data from specialist index firm, Scientific Beta. The Scientific Beta analysis shows an EM index blending six “well-established equity factors” outperformed a cap-weighted counterpart by an annualised 3.4 per cent since June 2002 and more than 7 per cent for the one-… [Read More…]