News

As the amount of capital available to them soars and equity markets grow more volatile, companies increasingly don’t want to go public – and don’t need to. The number of publicly-listed companies on US exchanges has roughly halved from 8,000 to 4,000 in the last 20 years, according to Liberty Street Advisors. And while part…

It’s been a torrid start to the year for 2021’s Fund Manager of the Year, Hyperion. The group is clearly feeling the “tech selloff” pinch after both its flagship funds posted negative returns and missed their benchmark expectations in January, also dragging down one-year numbers as a result. The Hyperion Australian Growth Companies Fund posted…

Investment research firm Morningstar announced the winners of their 2022 Fund Manager of the Year this week. Last year the big names included Hyperion Asset Management, First Sentier Investors and Franklin Templeton. This year was saw a suite of different names take out the top awards with a decided tilt towards low-cost, passive strategies. In…

Gerry Fowler, investment director of multi-asset strategies at abrdn, says everyone will have experienced inflation in some shape or form by now; be it energy bills, food, groceries or the price of cars, inflation is here to stay. “Inflation was considered initially just a purely Covid-related phenomenon. The transport-of-goods inflation went through the roof and…

Leading events company, The Inside Network is helping kick start the return to the CBD with the launch of their 2022 events program, starting with a full house Alternatives Symposium event, held at the city’s newest hotel, The W Melbourne during the week. After nearly 2 years of workers being told to work from home,…

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…

China has quietly done what many considered unthinkable, by launching its own digital yuan this week, created to reduce its reliance on cash. Real-world trials have already begun in the cities of Shenzhen, Chengdu and Suzhou. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been hard at work developing the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) since…

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…

Australia’s leading sustainable equity manager, Australian Ethical Investment (ASX: AEF), will list its high-conviction fund as an exchange-traded (ETF) version, later this week. The move comes following a spate of active ETF conversions, such as the Hyperion Global Growth Companies Fund (ASX: HYGG) which was converted to an ETF. It now offers investors the opportunity…

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…

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…

From being a ‘crypto critic’, Australia has quickly transformed itself to soon be a ‘crypto leader’ by proposing a framework for managing cryptocurrencies and crypto companies, in the biggest shakeup in the country’s payment systems in 25 years. Covid-19 showed us how quickly society digitised its payments systems with the onset of Afterpay and its…