Benchmark 10-year bond yields in the Eurozone have more than doubled since the end of April, when they reached an all-time low. Are we now simply witnessing a correction after markets overshot in the wake of the ECB’s bond-buying programme, or is this the beginning of a serious bond bear market as deflation worries have…
If you are running the European business of a global fund management group, historic fund flows can be a seductive but dangerous metric. In the murky, random world of investments, often the only thing you can be sure of is that markets are not going to do you the service of following familiar patterns. …
A 6.5% fall in the Shanghai stock exchange on Thursday and a 16% one-day spike in the VIX earlier on in the week are but the two most recent examples of sudden, significant market movements that have caught people off guard. Perhaps the best example, however, is the sharp compression and even sharper rise in…
Multi-asset funds took in a record €22.7bn in March, the latest month we have fund flows data available for, dwarfing net inflows into all other asset classes. Multi-asset funds are starting to fulfil a similarly dominant role in asset management as the Champions League does in football, according to Thomas Romig, head of multi-asset portfolio…
“The worldwide central bank interference we have seen since the financial crisis is extremely unhealthy,” said Richard Halle, a European equity fund manager for M&G who spoke at last week’s Expert Investor Spain event in Madrid, in response to a question from the audience. “Central banks have all exceeded their mandates massively and have been…
Both European equities and absolute return are now more popular with European fund buyers than ever before, according to Expert Investor Europe’s freshest Pan-European data. For both asset classes, the majority of fund selectors are telling us they will increase exposure. Appetite for US equities, by contrast, is at an all-time low. Almost two thirds…
With the United States’ equities bull-run into its sixth year and valuations looking pretty much up to the brim, investor sentiment has steadily shifted more in favour of European stocks – but should investors really make big cuts to their US allocation?
Alpha opportunities are limited, and investors should therefore only select funds which operate in a niche, says Markus Schuller, a Monaco-based consultant who gives asset allocation and strategic advice to global financial institutions.
Exactly half of the thirty-odd fund selectors attending the event said they have a preference for small caps within the emerging markets space. Only in Norway, there are more fans: six in 10 fund selectors there prefer small over large in EM. Over the past year, EM small cap managers have gradually found a more…
“Huge amounts of money have been flowing into multi-asset and risk-parity funds,” said Fred Ingham, head of international hedge fund investments for Neuberger Berman, who was one of the speakers at Expert Investor Europe’s first ever event in Monaco. “Kind of all that money is predicated on similar volatility assumptions about correlations within and across…
Montero achieved a total return of 41.37% on his portfolio of eight funds from April 2014 to April 2015. The showpiece of his portfolio is the Direxion Daily FTSE China Bull 3X ETF Fund, a leveraged fund on the Chinese equity market. The fund took full advantage of the rally in Chinese equities following the…
While this decompression will have been welcomed by investors looking to buy into the market, it was the opposite for those at the long end of the curve, with10-year bond holders losing around 5% of their capital. Though the price shift made the headlines, rather than coming as a great surprise it has merely served…
