How smart is ‘smart beta’ investing?

Investors increasingly embrace “smart beta” investing, by which we mean passively following an index in which stock weights are not proportional to their market capitalizations, but based on some alternative weighting scheme. Examples include fundamentally-weighted indices and minimum-volatility indices. In this whitepaper we first take a critical look at the pros and cons of smart

Capital provider: Australia’s Sunsuper

The $26 billion Australian super fund, Sunsuper, is investing in an increasing amount of exclusive unlisted asset deals. Chief investment officer David Hartley says the difficulties of banks in Europe in particular have led the fund down the path of increasing the amount of debt investments in its unlisted exposure. Much of this has been

What’s the impact of the stock:bond correlation?

The correlation between stocks and bonds in a rising interest rate environment can turn positive. So given the likelihood of a rate rise, what should asset allocation look like if investors are forward looking?   One of the growing trends in asset and risk allocations is to adopt a forward-looking view driven by macroeconomics, rather

Chinese SWFs need co-investors

China’s biggest sovereign wealth funds need, and want, co-investment opportunities in real assets and private equity and are open to new partnerships with international investors of the right credentials, and the longer term the partnership the better. This is the feedback of Michael Wadley, a specialist lawyer of Australian origin based in Shanghai, who runs

Evolution in risk reporting for sophisticated institutional investors

Risk reporting is increasingly regarded by sophisticated investors as an important ingredient in their decision-making process, authors from EDHEC argue that  the effective number of (uncorrelated) bets could be a useful risk indicator to be added to risk reports for equity and policy portfolios. Risk reporting is increasingly regarded by sophisticated investors as an important