As the all-powerful government in China continues to see the stellar growth it had become used to in recent years ebbing away towards 6% and perhaps even below, it will inevitably reach for new levers to pull. Just as they once did with Western manufacturing, the Chinese are likely to be looking at the United…
Taking part in a survey conducted by Cofunds, 60% of advisers revealed that their businesses are more economically viable than 18 months previously, despite more stringent regulations and significant changes to pensions landscape. Paul Stanfield, chief executive of the Federation of European Independent Financial Advisers, said that increased profitability was unsurprising and showed that advisers…
James Rubin served under President Clinton as Assistant Secretary of State from 1997 to 2000. At that time, as he reminded the audience, the world was a much simpler place for a diplomat like him than it is now. In his keynote speech at EIE’s Pan-European Congress in Rome, he talked us through the three…
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…
Speaking at a breakfast briefing on Thursday, WMA director of regulation Ian Cornwall said the EU legislation on the implementation measures for the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II is only expected in January 2016, which leaves precious little time to build the software systems required to implement the directive a year later. “There is…
While government bond yields and, in particular, gilt, bund and treasury yields have all been rising in recent weeks (German 10 year yields doubled last week) the last few days have seen sudden, sharp moves that have seen investors lose significant amounts of capital. As one investor put it to Portfolio Adviser on Thursday, if…
Investor risk profiling is at the heart of private wealth management. In theory, without proper knowledge of the investor’s goals, time horizon, liquidity needs, and risk aversion, it is impossible to recommend suitable investments or build efficient longterm investment strategies for that investor. Even worse, if an adviser is not aware of the investor’s risk…
The IMF yesterday warned that a rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve could lead to a new crisis, with a spike in bond yields and emerging market economies particularly badly hit. Most estimates of when the Fed will begin rate hiking, or ‘normalisation’ as it is often called, range from as early as…
