Asset Managers

RBC Bluebay has been named the top asset manager in Luxembourg, clinching the prestigious 2024 Morningstar Award for Investing Excellence.

An industry group backed by leading asset managers in Europe wants to shed light on the significant lack of diversity within the European asset management industry. The research project has been initiated by the Diversity Project Europe, an initiative of eight leading asset managers established last year, and is supported by PwC Switzerland. 

With so much media and public attention focussed on large-cap companies like any of the Magnificent Seven, it’s interesting to hear the case for investing in small and mid-cap companies. Those are market valuations, respectively, under 2 billion and between 2 and 10 billion US dollars. Henrik Blohm, who has run the BL American small & mid-caps fund since 2015, is a big proponent.

As its market value surpasses two trillion dollars, investment analysts praise Nvidia’s vision and operational prowess. The meteoric rise of Nvidia, the AI hardware manufacturer dubbed on Wall Street as ‘the most important stock in the world’, does have elements of surprise.

Morningstar has announced the finalists for the 2024 Morningstar Awards for Investing Excellence Luxembourg. Twelve funds are nominated for a Morningstar Category Award, and six asset managers are shortlisted for a Morningstar Asset Manager Award.

The awards recognise those funds and asset managers that have served investors well over the long term and which Morningstar’s Manager Research team believes will be able to deliver competitive risk-adjusted returns over time.

Interest in investing in private markets, private credit in particular, may have surged, but that growth is just the beginning. “We see a structural shift towards private credit,” says Joan Solotar, global head of Private Wealth Solutions at Blackstone.

To become content, one must liberate themselves from emotions. Amsterdam-based asset manager Stoic embodies ancient Greek stoicism, aiming to shield clients from emotional investing. “We are behavioural psychologists rather than asset managers.”

Protracted discussions over the EU’s new regime for European Long Term Investment Funds, known as Eltifs, are delaying the launch of new funds for these private asset investments.

Switzerland is preparing to step up competition with Luxembourg as a fund domicile for alternative investment funds. The industry, however, is not convinced that the Swiss alternative can fully match the international success of Luxembourg Raifs.

From next month, the Swiss will allow management companies to create a new type of fund known as L-QIF that will compete with the successful regime for Reserved Alternative Investment Funds, or Raifs, first made possible in the Grand Duchy in 2016.

More than two thirds of fund selectors see active fund management as key to outperforming in the current year, a reflection of its growing importance in uncertain markets, the latest Natixis 2024 Fund Selector Outlook Survey shows.

The survey uncovered a strategic pivot among wealth managers, who over the past decade have largely favoured passively managed index funds. However, 45% of fund selectors attribute the outperformance of passive investments to a decade of artificially low interest rates and minimal inflation, conditions that are changing.