Monaco fund buyers seek safe havens
Absolute return strategies are now more popular among European fund selectors than ever before. But Europe’s biggest fans are to be found in Monaco.
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Absolute return strategies are now more popular among European fund selectors than ever before. But Europe’s biggest fans are to be found in Monaco.
Tim Peeters is more than just a fund selector. The Belgian multi-tasker explains to Tjibbe Hoekstra why he is stocking up on absolute return funds and tells what eurozone investors should do to mitigate currency risk.
Investors in Germany are aware of an inconvenient truth: to have a reasonable chance to achieve their return targets, they need to take more risk.
Bond sentiment in Denmark has sunk well below freezing this winter, as fund selectors are left wondering how to squeeze return from their bond holdings.
Absolute return funds welcomed 43.5bn in net flows in 2014, by far the highest inflows of any asset class. By contrast, high yield bond funds, which were very popular in the previous three years, have fallen out of grace.
A significant minority of Portuguese fund selectors have decided to shed their exposure to developed market corporate and government bonds completely, in response to near-zero yields. Will the rest of Europe follow suit?
Appetite for alternative Ucits products among fund selectors in Barcelona has come down considerably since October. Especially long/short bond funds have fallen out of grace.
Belgian fund selectors have become more cautious in their outlook for most asset classes. Macroeconomic optimism is also clearly on the wane.
Event-driven strategies enjoyed the largest relative inflows of all alternative Ucits categories in the second half of 2014, but showed the worst performance.
Spanish investors seem to see multi-asset funds as the perfect hiding place against rising bond yields, and as a protection against equity market volatility. But are they fooling themselves?
Some 26% of institutional investors worldwide plan to increase their hedge fund exposure in 2015 while only 16% will cut their allocation.
The biggest equity asset classes all witnessed net outflows from European investors in November, while bond funds continue to attract more inflows.