Tensions have risen sharply on the Korean peninsula this year, as North Korea (NK) has accelerated the pace of rocket launches and has conducted its sixth nuclear test. In response, the United Nations has adopted its strongest sanctions yet, but the fault lines remain.
It has, to put it mildly, been a good year for passive investment funds that track a broad market index like the FTSE 100. Much of it has been at the expense of their active peers which try to seek out undervalued investments. Almost $500 billion has moved from the latter to the former so far this year. This keeps up a trend that has seen massive flows from active to passive strategies in recent years and the gradual growth of passive over the last 30 years.
Growth stocks have been outperforming their value counterparts for quite some time now. Rapidly expanding technology companies have been at the forefront of this trend, but we think it could be starting to reverse, at least partly.
The optimists noted strong and honest leadership, rule of law, business structures that bore scrutiny against the best in the world, allied with a global political elite that was willing the new South Africa to succeed.
At the end of June, I was honoured to be awarded Entrepreneur of the Year at the Elevator Awards at Mercure Ardoe House Hotel.
I say honoured because our small corner of the world is home to an outsized number of successful businesses run by the brightest minds. It is inspiring that the region has so many great and growing businesses from brewers and gyms through to engineers and publishers.
It was becoming obvious at about this time in 2007 that something very bad was happening in America’s banks. Air was rushing out of the US housing market bubble and the country’s banks, mortgage providers and brokers were bearing the brunt of the blast.
One of the biggest sub-prime lenders in the US, New Century Financial, had already filed for bankruptcy. Bear Stearns would soon bail out one of its hedge funds that was exposed to the US housing market to the tune of $3.2bn. The bank would be forced to liquidate it a month later. As we now know, what started in the US would spread around the world.
Part of the crisis response has been to rewrite the global bank rulebook. Much of this has been sensible. This has made them safer to the kind of capital flight that did for them in the crisis. Big capital buffers should mean that the largest banks will not need to turn to taxpayers if there is a repeat of the conditions of the financial crisis.
Asia Pacific’s (APAC) population, at almost 3.5 billion, is twice that of Europe and the Americas combined. The tremendous speed of migration from rural to urban locations has led to the creation of many large, densely populated cities, such as Hong Kong and Singapore.
Aberdeen Asset Management is an independent management company listed on the London stock exchange since 1991.
Founded in Aberdeen, Scotland by Martin Gilbert, currently the group’s CEO, it now numbers 39 offices in 26 different countries with more than 2.700 employees. Aberdeen Group has become Great Britain’s most important listed independent operator, with CHF 392.9 billion AuM as of 30/09/2016.
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