Investment Officer

Investors in emerging markets should completely ignore the 60 per cent worst performing companies when defining their investment universe. These companies bring extra risk, without rewarding you for it. In addition, investing in China is very different at the moment: great opportunities are better left aside in some cases. 

How do you achieve a year-to-date return of more than 31 per cent? “Well, common sense. That is our only strategy. We have no more information than the market. We don’t use a complex box with all kinds of variables”, said Theo Vermaelen, one of the four managers of the Buyback USA Fund.

Bond investor Pimco is also increasingly looking to alternatives to traditional bond categories. The fund house sees attractive income-generating opportunities in real estate and private credit and plans to continue investing in these areas. 

That is what Pimco wrote this week in its outlook for the coming years. The asset manager, which invests primarily in bonds, recommends working with flexible mandates in order to be able to make use of the full range of fixed-income opportunities. 

NN Investment Partners remains committed to serving its fiduciary clients in the best possible way, while continuing to do so with a local office and with people who know the local market as well as the laws and regulations. Satish Bapat, NN IP’s CEO, explained this in response to questions about the impact of the Goldman Sachs’ takeover on its customers, such as pension funds.

The Dutch private bank Van Lanschot Kempen has engaged BNP Paribas Securities Services as custodian for, among other things, custody, investment administration of the funds branch and custody and clearing activities for the bank. It concerns a mandate of EUR 16 billion in total.

The emergence of distributed ledger technology (DLT), of which blockchain is a form, could bring about a shift from a platform economy to a protocol economy. In this, data is the key to the economy, explained Ralph Wessels of ABN Amro in an article published by his employer on tokenisation, part of a three-part series on cryptocurrencies published by the bank. 

It is too early to talk about stagflation, but inflation risks are rising and therefore central banks need to be very vigilant about tightening monetary policy early if prices rise and global growth slows. 

There is a risky and dangerous novelty in the financial markets: “the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate, the three most important asset classes in the United States, are all extremely high”. 

That is the warning from Robert Shiller, the 2013 Nobel Prize-winning economist and scientist, in an opinion piece in the New York Times. “Never have the three been so overvalued at the same time in modern history.”

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Investment Officer Belgium, Investment Officer Luxembourg’s sister publication, greeted the 3,000th registered reader on its platform last month. This means that a substantial part of the target audience of investment professionals, asset managers, private bankers and insurance agents in Belgium is now being reached.

Although the UK led the way in the rollout of vaccinations and Brexit was largely overshadowed by the Covid pandemic and reopening, the divorce continues to cause uncertainty among investors.