Investment Officer

T. Rowe Price has won the Morningstar Luxembourg Fund Award for best fund house, the data provider announced on Thursday during a ceremony at the Centre Culturel ‘Schéiss’ in Luxembourg. T. Rowe Price also won the award for best fixed income fund house. Neuberger Berman, another US asset manager, received the honours for best equity fund house.

Inflows into global open-ended mutual funds almost doubled last year to around 1,600 billion dollars. The vast majority of the inflow was invested in bond funds, according to Morningstar data. 

The strong inflows have taken the total stock invested in mutual funds to almost 42,000 billion dollars in total.  In 2019, a net 1008 billion dollars flowed into bond funds, beating the previous record of 869 billion dollars achieved in 2017, according to Morningstar.

ETFs can be a source of systemic risk because they can induce important feedback effects in markets, such as increased volatility in periods of market stress. However, these effects can be mitigated by regulators, according to a research paper by Maureen O’Hara (pictured) of Cornell University and assistent-professor Ayan Bhattacharya of the City University of New York.

Global dividends rose 3.5% in 2019 to a new record of  1.43 trillion dollars (1.32 trillion euros), according to the Janus Henderson Investors Global Dividend Index. Dividend growth in Europe lagged other markets.

Nearly 1,200 billion euros in assets is tied up in newly launched funds that need at least 100 million euros to break even, according to research by the data consultancy Broadridge. Almost six in ten Luxembourg-domiciled funds have less than 100 million euros in assets. 

Four French asset managers have joined forces to develop an innovative tool that measures the impact of investments on global biodiversity. The fund houses - Axa Investment Management, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Sycomore AM and Mirova - think there is a growing interest in quantitative indicators.

Luxembourg wants to be the leading global centre in sustainable finance by 2025. It also wants to keep increasing the number of foreign banks and asset managers active in the country and strengthen its role as a wealth management hub by attracting more family offices.

Earning no yield on gold is better than a negative yield on bonds. Therefore investors should shift the allocation of their portfolios from negative yielding bonds to gold, according to Quintet.

Quintet (formerly KBL European Private Bankers) is positive about alternatives and tends to have an overweight in gold both for the long and short term.  

The best performing investment funds in 2019 are active funds. More importantly: they are mainly funds registered in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Those are the findings of a half-yearly study by consultant AF Advisors of investment funds available for private investors in the Netherlands. 

KBL epb changes its name into Quintet Pan-European private banking group. The Luxembourg-based bank does this in order to better reflect its partnership approach in wealth management.

KBL European Private Bankers, established in 1949 in Luxembourg and currently with subsidiaries in more than 50 European cities, is from now on called ‘Quintet’, as mentioned in a press release issued by the bank.