Asset Managers

“If you want to identify long-term trends, you would do well to select mainly companies that are best positioned within that trend. In general, these are the more expensive listed companies in the stock market.”

 This is the view of portfolio manager Jack Neele in a conversation with our sister publication Fondsnieuws. Robeco’s Global Consumer Trend Fund operates as much as possible independently of underlying macroeconomic factors such as interest rates and inflation. His approach is bottom-up when it comes to stock selection. 

Paris-based fund manager launches new fund to invest in the structural trends of the new China. The fund takes a sustainability approach to stock selection.

Luxembourg’s fund industry association ALFI has announced the appointment of its executive committee. The appointment was made by ALFI’s board of directors and publicised in an 8 July 2021 press release.

The members of the committee are:

Some businesses were driven to quickly put systems in place as the pandemic drove a sudden move to remote working. This has however meant that despite most businesses having a cybersecurity strategy in place, they haven’t had the time to understand everything that these new technologies can do, according to George Ralph, global managing director at RFA, a cybersecurity provider to the financial services sector.

In the coming weeks, the question will be answered as to what fate befalls two important Dutch asset managers: both NN Investment Partners and Actiam are awaiting the Salomon judgment of their mothers, being NN Group and Athora. While NN is still vaguely talking about “a review of strategic options”, at Athora it is only a question of to whom the daughter will be given.

BlackRock calls the new status quo in the global economy ‘New Nominal’. “The ’New Nominal’ is the situation in which higher inflation no longer causes sharply rising interest rates, and dangers for corrections in the stock markets are lower,” said Lukas Daalder, chief investment strategist at BlackRock, in an interview with Investment Officer Luxembourg’s sister publication, Fondsnieuws.nl. The reason is the 2021 Mid-year Outlook that was published last week.  

Equity markets in Europe fell sharply on Thursday. It was even the worst trading day of the year, with declines of the major indices from 1.7 to over 2 percent. The reason: investors are afraid of an economic slowdown and overvaluations. At the same time, analysts dived into the European Central Bank (ECB) minutes, which they found “extremely vague”.

Investment services in the Netherlands are the cradle of a true, possibly EU-wide revolution in finance: following in the footsteps of asset owners, such as pension funds, the major banks are replacing investment funds with so-called mandate solutions in their client portfolios.

The European Commission has identified six key areas to raise its ambitions in the field of sustainable finance. One of them is sustainable finance. To this end, it has drafted a regulation to establish a European standard for green bonds (EUGBS).

This proposal will be a voluntary standard available to all issuers to help finance sustainable investments. Green bonds are already being used to attract financing in sectors such as energy production and distribution, resource efficiency in housing and low-carbon transport infrastructure.

Since the outbreak of the Covid crisis, institutional investors have been increasingly looking towards sustainable funds. However, risk management is proving a major challenge, according to a study by asset manager Schroders.