Life assurers are having to make big strides to catch up with advisers and mass market retail providers when it comes to digital innovation to meet growing expectations from high net worth individuals (HNWI), according to Lombard International Assurance’s Aidan McClean.
It has now been a year since the UK electorate made, as a British fund manager put it recently, “a huge strategic error of the like the country hasn’t experienced in maybe a century” by voting for Brexit.
Passive funds have performed strongly in recent years, benefitting from relatively low volatility and more accommodative monetary policy in most developed economies, says David Macdonald, VAM Funds’sales and marketing director.
Wealth managers traditionally allocate meagre chunks of their portfolios to passive, but with assets in exchange-traded funds passing the $4trn (£3.2trn, €3.6trn) mark globally last month, that could be set to change.
India’s Nifty 50 index has been steadily climbing this year, hitting an all-time high of 9,675 earlier this month, but can it breach the 10,000 barrier?
MSCI has finally included China A-shares in its emerging market indices, but the decision seems long overdue.
Any hopes the Bank of England could soon hike interest rates have been dashed after news of the UK’s soaring inflation emerged on Tuesday, so should we settle in for the ‘new normal’ of an inflationary world?
The headlines say fund groups’ profits fell, but what else can we learn from McKinsey & Company’s Asset Management 2017 report into the European funds industry?
The thesaurus doesn’t offer a decent alternative to “uncertainty”, the post-election word du jour, yet Theresa May’s dire performance makes it likely we will be reading the word many times a day for the foreseeable future.
Investors have been struggling to call any winners and losers ahead of the UK election due to its lack of a binary outcome.
This year’s dollar weakness took most investors by surprise. There are, however, obvious reasons for this, and fundamentals suggest it could reverse.
Japan’s economy is beginning to show signs of life, but is this another false dawn, or a sign that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s reforms are working?
