Equities

Morningstar has released an interesting report that looks at a market metric that is often overlooked – fund outflows. Why do fund flows matter? They matter because they reflect all the cash that is flowing in and out of the fund. Naturally, when a fund has greater outflows, redemptions are outweighing new investment, usually because…

He is far from a household name in the Australian funds management industry – and definitely not one of the star stock-pickers often profiled in the financial media – but few would have begrudged Mugunthan (Mugsy) Siva a quiet fist-pump after the calendar-year returns for 2021 came out, with his India Avenue Equity Fund returning…

January fund manager returns are beginning to creep in, and it doesn’t look pretty. The Nasdaq finished as much as 9 per cent lower, with the S&P500 and Dow Jones down more than 5 and 3 per cent respectively. The dispersion of fund manager returns continues to grow, with the worst down as much as…

The 40/60, or balanced, portfolio has seen a growing stream of eulogies as “experts” the world over suggest it is broken. The reason, they surmise, is the diversification-based investment approach relying too much on long-duration assets, and the threat of interest rate hikes seeing bond and equity market correlation move to one. While there are…

If you only looked at the share prices of global equity managers GQG Partners (ASX:GQG) and Magellan Financial Group (ASX:MFG), you would be forgiven for thinking they were groups heading in very different directions. Yet the annual updates delivered by their high-profile chief investment officers, respectively Rajiv Jain and Hamish Douglass, highlighted a few similarities….

Platinum Asset Management’s latest quarterly update makes for difficult reading, with every fund excluding the Japan product underperforming the market over both the last three and 12 months. The story has been almost identical to that of Magellan, with both firms taking a “conservative” approach amid “overvalued” markets. Where Magellan (ASX: MFG) has erred on…

Australia’s leading micro-investing app, Raiz, is not so micro, having finally busted through the $1 billion funds under management mark. Last week, Raiz (ASX: RZI) delivered its quarterly (December 2021) numbers, which had some gleaming highlights. The company reported total revenue up 82.9 per cent year-on-year, which was a huge increase to $4.5 million in…

Well-known for its market leading, retiree-focused, franking-credit-driven Australian equity income funds, asset manager Plato Investment Management has gone green. Powered by the same detailed quantitative analysis that has driven tits portfolios since inception, the group this week announced the launch of the Plato Global Net Zero Hedge Fund. The fund will be “managed with a…

While all eyes remain focused squarely on whether inflation is “transitory” or not, “persistent” is the adjective that value manager Allan Gray uses to describe the position of the equity market. Speaking in its monthly update, the firm’s Australian managing director and chief investment officer Simon Mawhinney flagged the “exuberance for some stocks and disdain…

Financial professionals are the critical link between the clients’ world and the vast financial system. What often distinguishes financial advisers during troubled times is the ability to communicate between these two worlds effectively. Invesco Global Consulting’s mission is to help financial professionals do exactly that. As we speak to financial professionals during times of market…

“Learning to live with COVID will be the major theme of 2022,” according to Ken Leech, chief investment officer of leading fixed income manager Western Asset. But not necessarily in the way we think. As the Omicron variant ravages Australia and other parts of the developed world, Leech highlights continuing travel restrictions and lower vaccination…

Morningstar has released its “top-performing global equity fund managers in 2021” report. This year, the funds that performed the best contained a well-disciplined approach to investing, together with an experienced team capable of producing high-performance numbers. The research report found that the top three global fund managers also had outstanding longer-term performance numbers. What this…