Investment Officer Luxembourg

Investing is a game of relative things, at least if you do it right. Whether you have a short or long horizon, somewhere the question arises as to which asset classes are actually the most attractive. And since central banks have made it a sport since 2008 to keep inflating their balance sheets, the answer to that question was rarely, if ever, cash. Until now!

I show two charts below that show the amount of ‘yield’ for the main asset classes, adjusted for duration (interest rate sensitivity) on the one hand and volatility on the other.

Third-party assets in ABN Amro Investment Solutions’ funds and mandate solutions have been rising since October 2020, with 30 percent of assets under management now coming from clients other than ABN Amro. Meanwhile, the fund house is focusing on its latest solutions services.

Hugo Lasat has been at the helm of Belgian private bank Degroof Petercam for almost a year and a half. The biggest challenge of a bank CEO is constantly being in decision mode, he said in an interview with Investment Officer. “Procrastination is not done.”

Luxembourg’s financial supervisor CSSF on Friday brought attention to a warning from the grand duchy’s cyber security authorities which said an “alarming situation” has been created because more than 500 computer servers have not yet been updated with a critical software patch for Microsoft Exchange servers.

Luxembourg’s fund and asset management association Alfi has told Europe’s financial markets supervisor Esma that its proposed rules on the use of ESG-related names in investment fund names lack clarity and will render the marketing of these funds more difficult.

After years of dominance by growth stocks, dividend funds had slowly become the wallflowers of the investment universe. Investors flocked to technology, e-commerce and internet companies, which emerged as the stars in the stock market firmament partly due to the corona crisis and the resulting generous monetary policy of central banks. Barring some brief periods of outperformance, value stocks slid deeper and deeper into the mothball bin. However, a value renaissance began in late 2020, which received a firm tailwind in 2022.