Freddy van Mulligen, who is in charge of external manager selection at Achmea Investment Management in the Netherlands, is a dedicated factor investor. For the quality bucket of his equity portfolio, he relies on the Schroder ISF QEP Global Quality fund.
Belgian fund buyers believe Brexit will have a long-term negative impact on equity or bond prices, or even on both. Fund managers speaking at the Expert Investor Belgium forum are hardly more optimistic.
The gold price is the best performing asset class year-to-date. And declining production combined with robust demand from Asia means the outlook for the yellow metal is rosy, said Mark Lacey, manager of the Schroder ISF Global Energy Fund. But others challenge his view.
Retail investors expect their investments to produce an income far beyond what they can reasonably hope for, according to the annual Schroders Global Investor Study.
Sweden is a leader in socially responsible investing, so in Stockholm we gathered a group of leading SRI experts, fund buyers and managers to debate the big issues such as balancing ethics and performance, and whether to invest in the best company in ‘unethical’ areas – or avoid the sectors completely.
Just like all their European counterparts, apart from the dovish Swedes and Danes, Finland’s fund buyers want to see a US rate hike sooner rather than later. But what does that mean for emerging markets, one of their favourite places to invest at the moment?
Fund selectors in Barcelona, who again turned up in large numbers at the semi-annual Expert Investor Barcelona event last week, are yearning for another round of quantitative easing. They expect QE 2 will mainly benefit the equity markets, and they are selling off their bond holdings in unprecedented amounts.
The pace of inflows into index-trackers shows no sign of abating. With still three months to go this year, ETFs listed in Europe have already surpassed the previous inflows record set in 2014.
A rate rise by the Fed is long overdue, fund selectors in the Netherlands believe. Fund managers attending the Expert Investor Netherlands conference agreed and fiercely criticised the central bank for its alleged ‘backward guidance’.
While Europe’s finance ministers were having another round of fruitless Greek bailout talks just a few blocks away, Luxembourg-based fund selectors proved just as divided on Greece’s economic future as Wolfgang Schäuble and Yanis Varoufakis.
Dylan Emery talks to Franklin Templeton’s European chief Jamie Hammond about one of the driving forces of the European funds industry in the past few years: the growth of multi-asset, outcome-orientated funds.
According to a recent survey held by Schroders, European retail investors expect to achieve a return of 10% in the next 12 months, while half of their portfolio is invested in low-risk assets. In an interview with EIE’s Tjibbe Hoekstra, Erik Arranto of Elite Asset Management in Helsinki reflects on this apparent mismatch between risk…
