Asset Management

As a stock picker and value investor I rarely get involved in discussing macro issues during Investment Committees or during meetings with clients. Anyway, since talking about Trump, Macron, volatility and US Non-Farm Payrolls seems to be fund managers’ main occupation, I’ll try my best… But please, as grandpa Warren once told us, always remember: “Market forecasters will fill your ear but never fill your wallet”.

The swings of economies and financial markets resemble the swings of a pendulum. They spend most of the time oscillating near the average, swinging toward or away from the extremes of the arc. But when they reach one extreme you can be sure that sooner or later they are going to swing back to the midpoint. That’s because the effort needed to reach the extreme is the premise for the swing back. It goes without saying that investors don’t have to get caught in that movement (…and hopefully profit from that).
But, and there is one big fat “BUT”: no one can constantly and correctly predict the timing of the “swing back”.
The only thing that we can do is trying to figure out what the market conditions are at present. In better words: “We may never know where we’re going, but we’d better have a good idea where we are” (H. Marks).

The value of sustainable investments held by Swiss asset owners almost doubled in the past year, according to a survey by Forum Nachhaltige Geldanlagen (FNG), the association for sustainable investments in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, which reported that sustainable investments grew to CHF104bn (€95.8bn) as of year-end 2016, compared to CHF55bn a year earlier.

Invesco released its fifth Invesco Global Sovereign Asset Management Study on 5th June, an annual in-depth report on the complex investment behaviour of global sovereign wealth funds and central banks. This year’s study shows that geopolitical uncertainty and limited options to increase risk asset allocations are causing sovereign investors to make fewer allocation changes than at any point in the past five years, despite target-return gaps increasingly widening.

The survey, conducted face-to-face among 97 individual sovereigns and central bank reserve managers across the globe, including Canada, representing $12 trillion of assets, asked sovereigns to rate the importance of various economic and geopolitical factors on their investment strategies.

If you travel to New York to meet with alternative investment managers, most of the time you’ll visit lofty buildings in Midtown Manhattan, far away from the trading floors that once defined Wall Street’s physical presence.

Switzerland’s occupational pensions association has decided to back the country’s reform package, AV2020. During its general assembly last week, ASIP announced its support for the proposals agreed in parliament earlier this year, after seeking its members’ opinions on the Altersvorsorge 2020/Prévoyance vieillesse 2020 (AV2020/PV2020) reform package.

After considerable back-and-forth, the reform was approved in March. Next, Switzerland’s population will decide on the reform package in a binding referendum on 24 September.

At a meeting last week, CPEG, the pension fund for the Swiss canton of Geneva, has unveiled a set of structural measures to improve its funding level that could have the effect of cutting future pension benefits by up to 15%. The committee which manages the CHF12bn (€11bn) fund (employee, pensioner, and employer representatives) confirmed a plan to raise the age at which members can take a full pension from 64 to 65 as of 1 January 2018.

In the same occasion, it released the decision to lower the target pension level. The pension fund said this measure would be accompanied by other technical measures of less importance, but the cumulative effect could be a lowering of pension benefits by up to 15% for active members.

On Wednesday, April 5th the Horizons Medical Marijuana Life Sciences ETF began trading on the TSX. HMMJ is the first ever ETF offing investors direct exposure to a basket of cannabis related companies in Canada and the United States. According to its website, its stake didn’t exceed 10 percent in any individual company.
The Horizons Medical Marijuana Life Sciences ETF seeks to track the Solactive North American Medical Marijuana Index and it offers a way to invest without taking on individual company risk. However, the ETF only holds a total of 14 stocks, and while billed as a global fund, 10 holdings are Canadian-based. The medical marijuana industry is more developed in Canada than in other nations, and cannabis could soon become legal for all Canadian adults.

The Swiss federal government has published draft legislation aimed at preventing local governments from being represented on the boards of regional pension fund supervisors.

The proposal runs counter to that of a parliamentary initiative on the subject and means that there is now “competition” between the two, according to Dominique Favre, director at As-So, the supervisory authority for occupational pensions in western Switzerland.

The reform proposal, announced by the government last week, was presented mainly as “modernising” the first pillar, but it also touches on aspects of the second pillar.