The days of thinking wholly in terms of traditional asset classes when it comes to portfolio construction may have been numbered for some time; in Australia, the Future Fund’s statement of investment policies, when it started its investing life in July 2007, was perhaps the first sign that there could be a new way of thinking, with the usual categories of equities and debt securities subordinated to a distinction between “tangible” assets (defined as property, infrastructure and utilities, in listed or unlisted form); “alternative” assets, considered to include a range of risk premiums (for example, commodities and futures and insurance-based strategies); and skill-based absolute-return investments, or “intangible” assets.
When brand-new boutique investment house Federation Asset Management was introduced to “virtual” parcel delivery service Sendle, in 2018, it was a meeting of minds.
If anyone was thinking that recovery from the Covid-19 economic downturn would be quick and perfectly V-shaped, Qantas certainly had news for them, with its commentary around its recovery plan and $1.9 billion capital raising. “It will take years before international flying returns to what it was,” said CEO Alan Joyce. Qantas foresees flying to only…
The listing on the ASX this month of the Magellan Group’s Airlie Australian Share Fund as the first “Quoted Fund” – the first dual unlisted unit trust and active exchange-traded fund (ETF) structure in one listed unit – has been cited as a game-changer in many respects, with the primary emphasis being on its benefit…
One of the bugbears of the Australian capital market has been that the country has struggled to develop a meaningful corporate bond market: we’ve really only had one for five years, and the non-financial side of it is still pretty small, at about $50 billion. But like many things that Australia wants, or need, we…
Preliminary unofficial data on registrations of self-managed super funds (SMSFs) points to resurgent popularity of the vehicle. While Australian Taxation Office (ATO) data has not been officially updated, unofficial numbers have been shared at conferences showing a spike in registrations, reversing a trend of the last few years – indicating that Australia’s army of 1.1…
Of the many opportunities that were thrown up by the Covid-19 Crash, one of those that is still open – although weakening by the day – is that in the eight credit listed investment trusts (LITs). Most of this group were trading at small premiums to net asset value (NAV) prior to the crash, such…
Like most assets, bitcoin cruised into the new year in 2020, racking up a 44% rise until mid-February. Then, like the stock market, BTC took fright at the extent of the global disaster that Covid-19 rapidly proved to become. But while the S&P 500 index plunged by 33.7% before a floor was (at least temporarily)…