Being a traditional investor sucks, doesn’t it? You give your money to a fund manager, they charge fees and half the time don’t even outperform benchmark indexes.
Being a traditional equity fund manager sucks too. Investors give you their money, expecting you to find a stack of alpha — but at the same time they’re insisting your portfolio allocations don’t deviate TOO much from benchmarks, and getting antsy if your returns fall below trend. Read more
Financial advisers have threatened to pull millions of pounds out of Standard Life Investments after the provider took the unusual step of raising fees on some of its funds, bucking the trend for fund managers to cut headline costs for investors. The FT reports in an e-mail to financial advisers, SLI said that fees on seven retail funds and two institutional funds would rise from November 2011. Investors in the funds will not be informed in writing until next week. Two of SLI’s most popular products, the UK Smaller Companies and Global Equity Unconstrained funds, will see annual charges rise from 1.5 to 1.6 per cent, making them more expensive than many peers. Read more
Asia is drawing a growing number of Swiss wealth managers as traditional business from mature European markets stagnates or declines, notes the FT. Strong economic growth and rising incomes in key Asian countries have created a new customer base for foreign fund managers. At the same time, in Europe, bankers fear that recent planned tax deals between Switzerland and the UK and Germany will further erode traditional business from within the region. Read more
Active fund managers outperform in many circumstances, including most bull markets, a study of 30 years of performance for $7,000bn worth of US mutual funds has found, reports the FT. The study by FundQuest found that after adjusting for risk and after fees, active management outperform by 0.66 per cent in bull markets, but underperform by 0.68 per cent in bear markets. Read more
Short and err, simple, this one.
From JP Morgan’s European quant strategy team: Read more
It’s the non-shock headline of the day perhaps; but fund managers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch continue to position themselves for the `ideal’ economic recovery scenario — one where the growth rate is neither too hot, nor too cold.
From BofAML’s November Fund Manager Survey: Read more
From the annual fund management report by International Financial Services London (IFSL):
Global fund management Conventional assets under management of the global fund management industry fell 19% in 2008, to $61.6 trillion (Charts 1 and 2). Pension assets accounted for $24.0 trillion of the total, with $18.9 trillion invested in mutual funds and $18.7 trillion in insurance funds. Together with alternative assets (sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, private equity funds and exchange traded funds) and funds of wealthy individuals, assets of the global fund management industry totalled around $90 trillion at the end of 2008, a fall of 17% on the previous year. Read more
As asset management houses look to stay sharp, constantly improve and deliver the alpha investors require — Inalytics, the specialist manager evaluation firm, continues its in-depth analysis into the identification of manager skill with the launch of a new whitepaper unveiled today [Monday]. Its latest research and two accompanying portfolio case studies use hard statistical evidence to provide analysis of where managers are strong (or weak) and where the gaps lie.
GLG Partners LP, the US-listed asset manager and long-standing client of Inalytics, co-authored the whitepaper on ‘identifying manager skill’. In order to show tangible working examples, GLG granted access to two of its portfolios to illustrate how the firm uses Inalytics’ research to provide objective feedback to its managers and traders as2 part of an internal process of continual improvement. Read more
1Bernanke weighs in on robot wars; brings Keynes for backup
2About China's capacity to absorb more capital
3Secret liquidity and Scottish independence
4Spain's awful unemployment
5Pump up, debase
Show more6S&P 2,100, by Goldman Sachs
7Everlasting credit, the long view
8Buyback to enrich
9Apple Operations International, facts (?) du jour
10Collateral crunch-counting gets sophisticated
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