It has been a consensus trade for yield hunters this year: buying emerging market debt. A net €54bn has already flown into the asset class this year. This contrasts with recent outflows from high-yield bond funds.
Tag: Rico Bosma
The passive attack & the revenge of active managers
The rise of the passives looks unstoppable. Since 2008, assets in exchange-traded funds have increased from $772bn (€685bn) to almost $4trn, according to BlackRock. But this doesn’t mean active managers are cornered.
Investors expect equity returns to be ‘lower for longer’
Fund buyers expect returns from their equity portfolio to be significantly lower over the next five years. However, they still expect equities to outperform bonds by a considerable margin.
Investors brace for decline in dividends
Two thirds of institutional investors expect European companies to reduce their dividends or keep them unchanged this year, according to research conducted by Source, the ETF provider.
Emerging market debt – a reversal of fortunes
Investors are fleeing from emerging market debt, and optimism for any recovery in the near term is low, particularly for local currency government bonds.
Moving on from index trackers – Dutch discover factor investing
Investors in the Netherlands have become enthusiastic users of index trackers over the past years. But institutional investors in the country are leading the way into a new trend – factor investing.
Investors pile into currency-hedged European equity
Consider the following: you come together with your investment committee, look at macroeconomic fundamentals, GDP growth trends and companies’ earnings forecasts, and you come to the conclusion that European equities are far more attractive than stocks elsewhere. However, you and your colleagues also agree that, with a rate hike in the US this year ever more likely and European monetary policy to remain loose, the dollar will come closer to parity with the euro. So what do you do? You buy currency-hedged share classes.
High yield and equities – in the same classroom?
Equities and high yield bonds follow each other wherever they go, both when it comes to fund flows and returns, as we discussed last week on this site. The Barclays Global High Yield Index even followed stocks down on Monday in the aftermath of the breakdown of talks between Greece and its creditors. So, if high yield bonds behave more like equities than like investment-grade bonds, what does that mean for portfolio construction? Should the seemingly inseparable twins be placed in the same classroom or is it better to separate them?
Leveraged China ETF propels Montero to victory in Fund Picker Competition
Montero achieved a total return of 41.37% on his portfolio of eight funds from April 2014 to April 2015. The showpiece of his portfolio is the Direxion Daily FTSE China Bull 3X ETF Fund, a leveraged fund on the Chinese equity market. The fund took full advantage of the rally in Chinese equities following the […]
High yield fund flows emerge from the ground
The spike in net inflows coincides with renewed appetite among fund selectors for the asset class.The share of fund buyers telling us they will increase allocation to high yield bonds in the next 12 months almost doubled from 12% in December to 23% in late March. There seem to be several reasons for the uptick in interest. […]
