Investment Officer Luxembourg

Global financial markets are on tenterhooks on Tuesday, 22-2-22, after Russian President Vladimir Putin late on Monday recognised the separatists in the east of the Ukraine’s and ordered his troops into Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. 

Putin’s aggression means investors now face fresh uncertainty as the ongoing geopolitical developments will have consequences for the economy, for monetary policy, for cohesion among European countries and for transatlantic relations. 

Luxembourg Raifs appeal to clients worldwide, January data from its business register shows. QIC, the Queensland Investment Corporation in Australia, issued an infrastructure investment Raif together with Carne Global. Ocorian supported Singapore-based SilkRoad with a new real estate fund.

The difference between US 10-year and 2-year yields has fallen to around 45 basis points. That is a flattening of the US yield curve of almost a full percentage point in the last four months. It raises the question of whether a new recession is imminent.

Luxembourg has a promising potential to further build on its global hub status for investment funds by encouraging management companies to expand their businesses into international fund distribution, according to Xavier Parain, CEO of FundRock, Luxembourg’s largest third-party manager of investment funds.

The global ETF industry attracted some 76.4 billion dollars (67.2 billion euro) in net inflows in January, down from 84.38 billion dollars the same month a year earlier, according to ETFGI, a London-based research and consultancy firm.

Assets invested in the global industry for ETFs - Exchange Traded Funds - decreased by 3.9 percent to 9.9 billion dollars, down from a record 10.3 billion in December as a result of declining markets.

Growth stocks have been the apple of investors’ eye for years. Technology, software and e-commerce companies have grown imperturbably into leading billion-dollar corporations. In the wake of established names, the potential unicorns of the future sprang from the ground and eagerly took advantage of the opportunistic sentiment among investors to obtain fresh growth capital through a stock exchange listing. 

For two decades in a row money has money has flowed out of active funds. Last year, 100 billion euro suddenly flowed into active funds. It was the best year since 2000. 

Active managers naturally tend to emphasise value and size factors. As a group, they prefer relatively small companies that are cheap. The problem for these active managers, however, has been that the past decade has actually been exceptionally good for the larger and more expensive companies in the index.