Asset Manager

This week’s people moves feature appointments at Banque de Luxembourg Investments (BLI), FE fundinfo, Swissquote, UBP, Baillie Gifford, Mapfre, Robeco, and SFO Alliance.

As institutional investors worldwide increase their exposure to private markets, a trio of Belgian institutions offered a timely reminder that success in the asset class depends as much on discipline as on opportunity.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether artificial intelligence is in a bubble. The more important question is whether that’s necessarily a bad thing.

About a year after launching its first active ETFs, Robeco has attracted more than 1 billion euro in assets. Four of the six listed index trackers now hold over 100 million euro each—a key threshold for institutional investors.

To spot the next Tesla or Nvidia in time, Baillie Gifford is increasingly seeking growth opportunities outside the stock market. Tomorrow’s biggest winners are staying private longer, meaning most of the value creation now happens before the IPO.

Within private markets, interest in infrastructure is growing. Both ING and Rabobank are positioning this investment category as a “building block” in their private markets offerings. Goldman expects a larger asset allocation from institutional investors in the coming years.

Anna Rosenberg of Amundi Investment Institute says the same forces that once drove nuclear and space spending now fuel an expensive, open-ended struggle for technological supremacy.

ING wants to double its activities in private banking, wealth management, and investments by offering these services globally. In recent months, the bank introduced private banking in Poland.

Germany should move its trillions of euros in savings out of banks and put them to work for its Mittelstand through private markets. That was the message from Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of Blackrock’s Global Executive Committee, on Thursday during the presentation of a report on the European private markets sector.

Now that Trump has been taking things a bit easier over the past few weeks, stock valuations have become the topic dominating the markets. Market commentators are tripping over each other to declare how wildly overvalued the big tech names supposedly are. It’s a lot of parroting, really, while the actual numbers tell a more nuanced story.