Asset Managers

The Amundi European Equities ESG Improvers Fund differs from other ESG funds in the sense that it does not necessarily invest in ‘expensive’ ESG leaders. ‘We try to identify the ESG leaders of tomorrow that have only relatively recently started to make progress on ESG’, says lead portfolio manager Suzanne Keane.

The AIFMD may not be perfect but it is pretty good, so please don’t reform it after the current on-going review by the Commmission. This was the uniform message from a discussion at the ALFI European Asset Management conference on 16 March.

Under the partnership, through its digital platform Moonfare will provide access to private market strategies for Fidelity’s institutional and wholesale clients. Fidelity says it is responding to ‘increasing demand from its investors for alternative investment strategies.

Pets are not just fun to have around, they are also an excellent investment. ‘The pet economy is growing faster than the economy as a whole every year, because it benefits from a number of megatrends that are converging,’ according to Andreas Fruschki, manager of the Allianz Pet and Animal Wellbeing fund.

Looking for companies that can contribute to the decarbonisation of the European economy. That’s the mission of Echiquier Climate Impact Europe, a new impact fund of la Financière de L’Echiquier (LFDE). Remarkably, the fund mostly invests in established European companies.

Positive returns on investment-grade bonds have been hard to come by in the West. The Nordic market is one of the few exceptions, says Michael Weidner, head of European fixed income for global asset manager Lazard Asset Management. He especially likes Danish mortgage bonds.

‘Nordic bonds are a market segment with high credit quality, high liquidity and some extra yield without additional risk,’ he says. For Weidner, this market is one of the ultimate safe havens for risk-sensitive bond investors.

Bonds are among the best performing asset classes of the past 40 years. But it’s not unlikely the next 40 years will show a radically different picture. 2021 and 2022 could even yield negative returns as above-average economic growth and rising inflation could push bond yields up from their record-low levels.

The table below shows that bonds have done great over the past four decades. However, returns have fallen steadily from 222.7% in the period 1980-1989, to 109.9% in 1990-1999, to 84.7% in 2000-2009 and to 44.5% in the ten years from 2010-2019.

Disruption is wiping out entire sectors and companies. While winners are hard to predict, using megatrends such as digitalisation and ageing to identify the losers in advance is the best approach, says Henk Grootveld, head of trend investing at Lombard Odier IM.

Emerging market debt is perfectly placed to benefit from the economic recovery that will follow the current lockdowns. Especially local high-yield bonds are in a sweet spot, says Capital Group’s Luis Freitas De Oliveira.

Capital Group, T.Rowe Price and iShares have been nominated as finalists for the Morningstar Awards for best asset manager across all asset classes in Luxembourg.

The nomination for iShares is a first: never before a passive fund house received a nomination for the Morningstar Award for best asset manager. iShares was also nominated for best fund house in the category fixed-income overall, in an apparent rebuke of active management. This shortlist is also all-American, with BlueBay and Capital Group being the other nominees.