Funds Hub
Money managers under the microscope
Morning Line-Up: BlackRock bullish, IPOs, Tower Australia
News and views on the asset management industry from Reuters and elsewhere:
BlackRock founder upbeat on growth potential – FT
Results revive Man
Some good news for Man Group this morning as its shares soared 6.5 percent on this morning’s full-year results.
Asset levels were actually down since the end of March (from $39.4 bln to $39 bln), but such have been the outflows from Man’s funds that these figures imply a stabilisation of assets and, according to Credit Suisse, zero net outflows.
from Commentaries:
Don’t hold your breath for European flotations
A web-based survey of more than 40 European institutional investors by investment bank Jefferies shows most -- 83 percent of those who responded -- are not expecting a re-opening of the IPO market in the UK and Continental Europe before the middle of 2010.
Only 23 percent of the analysts, portfolio managers and dealers surveyed reckon the IPO market will re-open by the end of this year.
from Global Investing:
Hobson’s choice
Imagine you're an institutional investor holding a great deal more illiquid, price-impaired assets than you're comfortable with. Do you a) hold on to them and pray that the price rebounds, or b) sell now and take a loss, before things get even worse?
This is the dilemma facing institutional investors who went just that little bit too far out along the risk curve in search of extra yield. According to Tom Graf, who heads BNY Mellon's global workout solutions business, clients have to-date largely preferred to wait for markets to rebound, and in some cases this could well make sense.
Every Cloud…
As politicians and regulators worldwide prepare a new blueprint to marshall the hedge fund industry, the organisers of the GAIM industry conference release the early agenda for their annual Monaco pow wow.
Unsurprisingly, the June 16-18 summit takes the theme: Transformation In A New World Order. And even less surprisingly, several sessions are set to ponder how to best snag a new breed of circumspect investors, and how to adapt to a new regulatory environment.
Staying positive
There seems to be an endless wave of bad news hitting the hedge fund industry at the moment — gates and suspensions, record poor performance, the Bernard Madoff scandal and so forth – but there are still one or two reasons to be positive.
According to a survey of institutional investors by alternative assets data group Preqin, conducted in January (and therefore after the alleged Madoff fraud came to light), only 8 percent said they were no longer confident about hedge funds and would reduce investments.
