“Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good.” Ottawa’s first female mayor, Charlotte Whitton, made this comment in 1963, and it seems not much has changed since then, writes FIONA REYNOLDS, CEO of AIST.
Funds perform but discount fee hype spoils choice
Australian hedge funds (including offshore funds sold in Australia) returned 2.64 per cent in September, taking the year-to-date performance to 2.54 per cent. Fixed income and market-neutral strategies led the pack with returns of 7.83 per cent and 5.09 per cent respectively for the nine months to September 2010. Perpetual unit registry changes key to Sonata
Perpetual Investments had a major technology problem: three separate unit registry applications, increasing costs, and growing dissatisfaction from clients and staff. The first system was based on an unscaleable, proprietary legacy platform called VAX/COBOL/ RDB, which stored about 3 million transaction histories. The second was a Bravura Solutions application supporting Perpetual’s Select multi-manager offering. The third was the underlying platform for all of its other products. In the end, there were more than 260 users of these platforms and 200,000 active accounts, and staff had to be trained to use all three disparate applications.
Australia trails region on same-day affirmation
Australian funds managers have emerged as regional laggards when it comes to affirming trades on the day they are made, a practice which a major study by a central trade matcher, Omgeo, has found to be a pre-requisite for lowering operational risk and increasing settlement efficiency. MICHAEL BAILEY reports.
Put retirement benefits on statements
Retirement benefit projections are set to be on members’ statements within six months, following Provisio’s upgrade to its rapid advice delivery software for clients’ super funds. PHILIPPA YELLAND reports.
Gone to the Dark Side
For good reasons, institutional investors in Australia are tapping into dark liquidity. But as more dark pools appear, new regulatory proposals to protect price formation on the open market and define which trades can be executed in the dark have been made. SIMON MUMME talks to dark liquidity vendors about the state of play in block trading.
Private equity’s rocky cycle
This vintage of recessionary buyouts in private equity will be memorable – but for all the wrong reasons. High interest costs and deal prices are not at the low levels of previous fire-sales, and this vintage is not going to deliver returns that are twice those of more-normal vintages. PHILIPPA YELLAND reports.
