Investment Officer Luxembourg

Three fund directors have sent a letter to Europe’s top regulatory body to complain about a lack of action by Luxembourg’s regulator CSSF to protect investors.

They run several Luxembourg-domiciled funds, known as LFP I, that were defrauded for millions of euros, contends LFP I director David Mapley. Mapley says the CSSF ‘is really obstructing our work’ to recoup the lost funds, he told Investment Officer.

T. Rowe Price has won the Morningstar Luxembourg Fund Award for best fund house, the data provider announced on Thursday during a ceremony at the Centre Culturel ‘Schéiss’ in Luxembourg. T. Rowe Price also won the award for best fixed income fund house. Neuberger Berman, another US asset manager, received the honours for best equity fund house.

The proposals by the Technical Expert Group (TEG) for sustainable benchmarks and ESG disclosure will not lead to an increase in investments in the climate transition, says index provider Scientific Beta in a vicious 60-page rebuke of the TEG’s final report, which was published in autumn last year.

Luxembourg is set to bear a big responsibility for making the green financial revolution happen.  But are the rules of game clear enough, with reporting set to begin in just over a year’s time? And what role can Luxembourg’s fund service providers play?

Inflows into global open-ended mutual funds almost doubled last year to around 1,600 billion dollars. The vast majority of the inflow was invested in bond funds, according to Morningstar data. 

The strong inflows have taken the total stock invested in mutual funds to almost 42,000 billion dollars in total.  In 2019, a net 1008 billion dollars flowed into bond funds, beating the previous record of 869 billion dollars achieved in 2017, according to Morningstar.

ETFs can be a source of systemic risk because they can induce important feedback effects in markets, such as increased volatility in periods of market stress. However, these effects can be mitigated by regulators, according to a research paper by Maureen O’Hara (pictured) of Cornell University and assistent-professor Ayan Bhattacharya of the City University of New York.

Global dividends rose 3.5% in 2019 to a new record of  1.43 trillion dollars (1.32 trillion euros), according to the Janus Henderson Investors Global Dividend Index. Dividend growth in Europe lagged other markets.