Investing

The Chinese stock markets have been on fire for a few weeks now. The large price losses have also surprised local fund managers, and investors are wondering whether they can still invest in the country with peace of mind. Fund manager David Raper (photographed above) thinks these concerns are somewhat exaggerated.

PGIM Investments has seen the assets under management in its UCITS fund range in Europe double from 4.8 to 9.6 billion US dollars in the past 1.5 years. This increase is mainly due to new inflow and to the fact that the American asset manager, as an active house, charges competitive fees.

What can we expect from China’s regulator in the coming period? This is a vital question given the restrictions recently imposed by Beijing in the education sector. Among other things, antitrust risk hangs over the market, with the government trying to address economic dominance.

Paris-based fund manager launches new fund to invest in the structural trends of the new China. The fund takes a sustainability approach to stock selection.

There are a lot of opportunities in finance (particularly in Asia), but you have to leave the beaten track. And stock market operators are the most important fintech companies today. There are also plenty of disruption opportunities in Fintech 2.0. So says William Pang of Capital Group in an interview with Investment Officer.

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’.

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.

Leading European digital banks now have nearly 100m customers. This is according to research by Accenture presented at a ABBL online roundtable on 10 June entitled “Neobanks: An opportunity behind each threat”. Even if one-in-six of the continent’s population have an account, the concept of pure online banking has yet to go mainstream. But this could be about to change.

Private equity investor Sun European Partners has shifted its focus from typical turnaround investments to ‘good companies that we can turn into top companies’, said Mark Corbidge, head of Sun Capital’s European subsidiary, in an exclusive interview with Investment Officer. ‘Special situations awards we no longer accept.’

According to traditional valuation metrics, US equities are expensive. In this analysis, we provide two arguments for continued outperformance of US equities, and two in favour of better performance of non-US equities.