Opinion

The reopening of borders to international travellers over last weekend was naturally cheered as a return to some level of normality. Tourism and hospitality operators (those who were able to hold on, that is) now stand to benefit from both a surge in customers and also the potential to attract new staff. Australia has been…

With our long period of near-zero interest rates seemingly at an end, every investor’s attention turns to the balance of their portfolio. Conventional wisdom is that now is the time to rethink exposure to real estate investments because rising interest rates are a drag on property values and rising inflation benefits other asset classes. There…

The global shift towards decarbonisation is happening and accelerating at a rapid rate, to ensure the removal and reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to keep temperature rises to below 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. This shift to reduce the environmental impact together with the pandemic saw an acceleration in “green” stimulus…

“Don’t ask yourself if it’s going to rain, ask yourself if you have an umbrella, in case it does,” says Hugh Selby-Smith, co-chief investment officer and head of research at specialist global equity manager Talaria Capital. Drawing on decades of experience, the firm’s January investor update offered both a history lesson and an insight into…

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…

Anyone shopping for basic goods or reading the papers in recent months has likely had more than enough of the “supply chain issues” that many businesses are facing. While many of these are self-inflicted, whether due to our closed borders, the running-down of inventory or a plethora of other issues, they are indeed real. Unfortunately,…

Uncertainty has returned to the market after a bumper 2020, fuelled by persistent inflation and a pandemic that never really went away. But in its latest alternatives outlook, JPMorgan warns that investors “aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.” “Up close, the ‘trees’ in the 2022 outlook are clear,” writes Anton Pil, global head of…

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…

Perennial Partners’ sustainable small cap equities fund, the Perennial Better Future Trust, was up 2.4% net of fees in December, beating the S&P/ASX Small Ordinaries Accumulation Index’s return of 1.4%. The trust has been in operation for almost four years, since inception in February 2018, and has grown to exceed $100 million in assets. The…

“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…

If we are truly honest about the state of the Australian investment industry when it comes to alternatives, we were very much a backwater for many years. That is, at least, at the mass market, retail, or wholesale level. For many years, the best alternative assets advisers could access were the so-called “black boxes” of…

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…