Max Severijns

To increase the range of responsible and sustainable solutions available to investors, Invesco launched the Solar Energy UCITS ETF this month. But surprisingly, even this ETF is only “light green”, under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).

In April this year, Auréus launched the Equities Blue Chips fund. The fund is in Morningstar’s highest rated percentile for sustainable funds. “That is amazing. The fund is not labelled as sustainable, and just this one is in the top percentile,” said Auréus’s Chief Commercial Officer Han Dieperink in an interview with Fondsnieuws, Investment Officer Luxembourg’s sister publication (for whom Dieperink writes regular commentary articles).

Emerging companies in the technology sector are often heavily overestimated, according to tech investor Richard Clode of Janus Henderson. “The trick is to remain cynical,” he said. Remarkably, he said he also sees opportunities in emerging market companies that have yet to go public. 

The bond market is in the doldrums. The value of the world’s negative yielding debt has risen to more than USD 16,000 billion, the highest level in six months. Yet not every bond investor is worried about negative yields.

“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. 

All indications are that 2021 will be an unprecedented record year for equity ETFs. In the first six months alone, inflows reached USD 519 billion. This means that all previous records have already been broken. Decades of growth for passive products await’.

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”.

Despite the huge cost in terms of human lives and economic damage of the corona crisis, European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) summarises the performance of the European fund industry as ‘resilient’. 

This was reflected in the Brussels-based organisation’s 2021 Factbook, published this month. It outlines the most important European trends currently affecting the fund industry. 

The net inflow of investment funds in the world exceeded EUR 1 trillion in a single quarter for the first time in history. This is according to the analysis of the European Interest Group for Asset Managers (Efama).

In its latest quarterly report, the Brussels-based Efama charts global trends for the first three months of 2021. For example, net sales of global investment funds increased significantly by 7.3 per cent. The US and Europe both recorded net asset growth of 4.5 per cent.