Asset Managers

With economic growth slowing down in all three of the world’s major economies, investors are best advised to opt for the geographical region with the least messy outlook, leading international economist Mohammed El-Erian has told a Nordic conference. “The cleanest dirty shirt is in the US.”

The EU Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance Products (Priips) regulation is set to take effect across the EU from January, requiring the production of a paper-based Key Investor Document (KID) for all products sold to European retail investors. The UK, meanwhile, has started to explore a new digital retail disclosure system.

JPMorgan Asset Management plans to convert a number of active mutual funds in the US to passive ETFs next year. The asset manager is not alone. Globally, passive is starting to catch up with active.

Swiss-based real estate investment manager Empira has sold a 16,000 square metre property project in Vienna for an undisclosed amount. The property had been held through a Luxembourg Reserved Alternative Investment Fund.

The Zug, Switzerland based firm had only bought the property two years ago. In a statement, Empira spoke about a “successful sale at attractive terms… exactly in line with the investment approach of this product”. 

Total assets under management in Europe amounted to 28,400 billion euro by the end of September, reflecting a decline of about 12 percent from year-end 2021 levels as bond and stock markets fell amid rising inflation and interest rates and slowing economic growth following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

An investment fund owned by Luxembourg-based Cube Infrastructure Managers has recently announced a first-phase investment of 50 million euros into a wholesale fiber-to-the-home/ fiber-to-the-office project in southern Italy.

When completed, this network will bring fiber broadband to 130,000 locations within two years, reaching over 20 municipalities and a number of business parks in rural and semi-rural areas. It will create new job opportunities in the region.

Vanguard, the world’s second-largest investment fund manager after BlackRock, is finding itself in a political tug of war in the US that now has led to its decision to withdraw a top international alliance of asset managers that seeks to promote sustainable, net zero investments, the Net Zero Asset Management initiative, also known as NZAM.

British activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners is aiming its guns at BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, and its CEO Larry Fink, criticising the firm for its ‘hypocrisy’ over its ESG and sustainability practices while drawing attention to its failure to exercise proper ESG stewardship. The asset manager’s behaviour risks becoming “an obstructive force” to the effective functioning of capitalism, it said, calling for Fink to step down.

Following the precarious situation surrounding troubled Belgian broker Merit Capital and its financial problems, the management of its flagship Merit Capital Global Investment Fund has now been full transferred to Belgian private bank Dierickx Leys. The 400 million euro fund will be renamed Dierickx Leys Fund III.

Although the global economy finds itself in a slowdown phase, it continues to demonstrate resilience thanks to domestic consumption in the US and government relief measures to reduce energy bills in Europe, Guy Wagner, Chief Investment Officer at Luxembourg asset manager BLI - Banque de Luxembourg Investments, said in his latest investment report. Over the next year however, he expects the global slowdown to deepen.