Funds Hub
Money managers under the microscope
10 years of fund industry evolution: Lipper
“A game of two halves” is a footballing cliché in the UK, but was particularly apt for the European funds industry in 2011. The stock market falls that began in July not only ended the healthy sales activity that had started the year, but triggered a wave of redemptions that rolled through the industry. While these outflows ebbed slightly in the final quarter of the year, there were few who did not feel the cold chill of investors withdrawing from mutual funds by the year-end.
Net sales of long-term funds (i.e. excluding money market funds) in 2010 (305.8 billion euros) exceeded not just those of 2009 (257.7 billion), but also the level achieved in pre-crisis 2006 (265.9 billion). Expectations were therefore high when the first half of 2011 saw inflows of 96.1 billion euros, but this was followed by outflows of 155.9 billion, so that the year as a whole ended in the red (-59.8 billion) for only the second time in a decade (the 2008 total was -391.4 billion euros).
Giving investors the motivation and confidence to move money out of deposits and into funds amid the ongoing political and economic maelstrom remains a crucial challenge for asset managers.
But a longer term view is also useful in fully understanding the current status of the industry and the dynamics that have been at work to shape its current structure.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
2011 saw a slight contraction in the number of funds for only the second time in the past decade. The last time this happened (in 2009) the net reduction was 801, while the latest figure was a mere 43. In recent years there have been about the same number of fund launches in both halves of the year, but in the latest year there was an unsurprising tail-off (1,687 over the first half; 1,291 in the second) partly the result of some planned launches being shelved. Just as 2009 did not herald a new dawn of product rationalisation across the industry (there was a net increase of 871 funds in 2010), so it seems very unlikely that 2011 will either. Instead market conditions will largely dictate where product development priorities lie.
With new fund launches such a significant part of asset management companies’ activity, it is worth providing further insights here. Looking back over the past ten years it is possible to see the proportion of growth in the industry that relates to these new launches. Over the first five years (2002-2006), the 79 percent growth in industry assets was attributable to both new launches (60 percent) and existing funds (40 percent).
How much do UK investors care about costs?
One way of measuring this is to look at the assets invested in index tracking funds (where minimising costs is a core part of the product) and compare this to funds of funds (where the importance of professional fund manager selection entails an additional cost).
With 30.5 billion pounds invested in the former and 56.6 billion pounds in the latter as of November 30 2011, it would seem that retail investors in the UK are almost twice as likely to pay more for active management and fund selection than to minimise costs and seek to mimic the returns of an index. A similar picture is revealed for sales activity in 2011.
Having been researching this subject since 1999, I continue to believe that transparency and awareness of the ‘drag’ of charges on returns are crucial for long-term investors. Of course cost awareness cannot guarantee investors’ happiness and neither will greater transparency inevitably lead to greater competition. But both are powerful selling points for the mutual funds industry.
Other comments on the current debate:
· Fiduciary responsibility. This concept is acknowledged in the UK – to act in the best interests of investors – but it has not been extended to the oversight of fees. This surely needs further consideration.
from Jeremy Gaunt:
Getting there from here
Depending on how you look at it, August may not have been as bad a month for stocks as advertised. For the month as a whole, the MSCI all-country world stock index lost more than 7.5 percent. This was the worst performance since May last year, and the worst August since 1998.
But if you had bought in at the low on August 9, you would have gained healthy 8.5 percent or so.
In a similar vein, much is made of the fact that the S&P 500 index ended 2009 below the level it started 2000, in other words, took a loss in the decade.
That completely ignores, however, a more than doubling of the index between 2002 and 2007.
There is a danger sometimes in allowing the calendar to dictate your interpretation of financial market behaviour.
from Jeremy Gaunt:
Don’t invest in gold?
Bit of fun, this -- and might raise some issues about returning to the Gold Standard. The S&P 500 stock index priced in gold (thanks to Reuters graphics whiz Scott Barber):
Jim Saft: Monkey business
By Jim Saft
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., March 10 (Reuters) – Patience, particularly in investing, is one of those virtues everyone praises but for which no one seems willing to pay.
An investment manager given money to manage is going to do the same thing with it pretty much every time: put the money to work.
This is true almost always and almost without reference to how attractive the alternatives are. Partly this is because the fund manager reasons that you would not have given him money if you wanted him to keep it sitting idle in a liquidity account, but also because most fund managers spend most of their time managing a specific kind of risk: career risk.
Even if they may be personally convinced that the markets they follow do not represent good value, the decision to stay in cash is personally risky for them. People don’t get fired for trailing the index by a point or two, but they do often if they miss a big rally.
That leaves most money managers with a perverse incentive; look like everyone else, take a few small bets away from the index you track and live to pay off your mortgage and fully fund your kids’ educations.
It is also, I would argue, psychologically hard for primates like us to refrain from activity; big cats do well out of waiting for their moment but monkeys usually make a living through ceaseless activity.
from Reuters Investigates:
Morbid money-spinners
If the life settlements market seems ghoulish, here’s a British scandal which isn’t doing the image of the business any favours. It’s one of the worst the country’s seen.
Around 30,000 mainly elderly investors in the UK put their money into a company called Keydata, hoping to make a little extra cash to fund their own retirement with the promise of a healthy return.
What they were buying sounded kosher, even if it did depend on how fast their wealthy American counterparts were dying. Of course, the investors may not have known that.
As is so often the case with these things, the projections were a little optimistic. And then some other irregularities blew up. Around 100 million pounds went missing, one of the business’s partners dropped dead in Singapore and the investment company was shut down by the regulators, leaving British pensioners like Tony and Pam Tobin out of pocket. The Serious Fraud Office is investigating.
Tony and Pam Tobin
Undeterred, the other key character behind Keydata is determined to fight the regulators’ decision. "I am someone who can make the impossible possible," he tells us.
Here’s lookin’ at you KIID
The vexing question of how much to tell retail investors about what exactly they are buying has been exercising industry participants at the Reuters European Funds Summit. Although the sentiment is for more transparency and simplicity, as exemplified by the EU’s new two page marketing document, some managers feel this won’t fully reflect the risks and processes involved in a product.
The Key Investor Information Document (KIID), to be rolled out under UCITS IV, will replace the little loved ”simplified” prospectus as the primary document via which fund promoters communicate with prospective clients – something that makes some managers very uneasy.
Noel Fessey, managing director of Schroder Investment Management in Luxembourg, admitted he had a bee in his bonnet about KIID, which requires managers to be very concise in their descriptions. “Under UCITS IV the fund prospectus becomes the subordinate document but that’s the main document in which you can set out all the risks.”
He agreed that the KIID would allow investors to compare products – something the simplified prospectus had failed to do, but added, “There’s a significant degree of optimism by the regulator about what the KIID can do.”
The problem for regulators and fund managers is trying to strike a balance. ”If you are too technical you will scare people,” said Andrea Favaloro, head of retail at BNP Paribas IP/Fortis Investments. “We need to explain what happens in simple words.”
Maybe fund managers will have to experiment with some very small fonts.
from DealZone:
R.I.P. Salomon Brothers
It's official: Salomon Brothers has been completely picked apart.
Citigroup's agreement to sell Phibro, its profitable but controversial commodity trading business, to Occidental Petroleum today puts the finishing touches on a slow erosion of a once-dominant bond trading and investment banking firm.
When Sandy Weill (pictured left) staged his 1998 coup -- combining Citicorp and Travelers, Salomon Brothers was a strong albeit humbled investment banking and trading force. Yet little by little, a succession of financial crises, Wall Street fashion and regulatory intervention has whittled away at the once-dominant firm.
Not long after the Citigroup was formed, proprietary fixed income trading -- once the domain of John Meriwether, was shut down after the Asian debt crisis fueled losses that Weill could not stomach.
The Salomon name disappeared long ago as investment bankers and underwriters were rebranded Citigroup Global Markets.
Now Phibro, the former Philips Brothers that merged with Salomon in the early 1980s, is to be cast off because its energy traders made too much money when the rest of the bank suffered losses and required a $45 billion of taxpayer bailout.
