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Investor Profile

Making money from ESG

It is a measure of the experience of the Australian fund, Local Government Super, on ESG that it will instruct its managers on which companies to omit from portfolios. The New South Wales fund started its policy of applying environmental, social and governance filters to its investments by omitting tobacco companies in 2000. Today, it […]
David RowleyJanuary 29, 2014
Investor Profile

Inside the Future Fund’s investment decisions

The $91 billion Australian Future Fund’s approach to investing is to get even more sophisticated as it borrows ideas and techniques from other investors, including the risk management and portfolio construction techniques of multi-strategy hedge funds. David Rowley speaks to CIO David Neal. Many will quickly tell you there is greater return to be made […]
David RowleyDecember 12, 2013
Investor Profile

TelstraSuper: size-conscious success

What is the optimum size for an institutional investor? This is a question foremost in the mind of Jim Christensen, chief investment officer of TelstraSuper, the pension scheme of Australian telecommunications company Telstra. After four years of expansion, he believes he has maximised potential by gaining the optimum level of inhouse investment. Now running 20 […]
David RowleyAugust 7, 2013
Uncategorised posts

UniSuper defies accepted thinking

Mention any asset class to John Pearce, chief investment officer of Australian superannuation fund UniSuper, and he will doggedly set out the good and bad thinking around it. A common source of his ire is the sight of investors herding around a belief based on a lack of rigorous thinking. Good practice for him involves […]
David RowleyJune 12, 2013
Uncategorised posts

Scenario analysis: applicable to anything?

Attempts to apply a formula to asset allocation based on an asset’s historical volatility and relationship with other assets tend to fail when presented with black-swan events. Equities tend to rise along with commodities except when presented with political events such as the price hikes in oil in 1973 that sent equities into free fall. […]
David RowleyJune 5, 2013
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