AXA Investment Managers

Investment Strategy

Managers bullish on Chinese and Indian corporate debt

Australian investors are being urged to increase their exposure to Chinese and Indian credit, owing to imminent political change, low default rates and high yields. Corporate emerging market debt represents only 5 per cent of the BofA Merrill Lynch Global Corporate Index, but AXA Investment Managers has double this exposure in several of its strategies. […]
David RowleyApril 14, 2014
Hedge Funds

Murky sovereign bond valuations made clearer through ESG

Australian investors are looking to environmental, social and governance (ESG) screenings of sovereign bonds as a better means of understanding an asset class distorted by quantitative easing. Investors such as HOSTPLUS and Vicsuper have already gone on record to state their desire to either cut back on the asset class or to seek alternative indices, […]
David RowleyMarch 17, 2014
Unintentional

Climate change: a fiduciary duty to act

There are many accounts about the severity of pollution that rapid industrialisation has brought to China, and one of the most striking is the example of not being able to see from one end of Tiananmen Square to the next owing to smog. This highlights the dangers that unchecked carbon emissions poses, but the government’s […]
David RowleyJuly 22, 2013
Unintentional

MySuper: cause and effect

Ross Jones, deputy chairman of Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, has an unswerving belief in the good that MySuper is bringing. Finding others who agree with him is hard. Leading industry figures spoken to for this article take a more jaundiced view. They say, if anything, compliance has held up funds’ plans to innovate and bring […]
David RowleyMay 27, 2013
Administration

Board diversity helps emerging-market penetration

A study by AXA Investment Managers of Europe’s top 50 companies shows that those with a greater percentage of board members from emerging market economies source more of those revenues from those markets. Matt Christensen, AXA’s Paris-based head of responsible investment is in Australia to launch a new environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework for […]
Lachlan ColquhounOctober 22, 2012
Investment Strategy

AXA IM goes low-cost for MySuper

AXA Investment Managers is positioning itself for the growth in demand for low-cost-product solutions as Australian super funds look to adapt their offerings for MySuper, launching a series of corporate-bond strategies. The “SmartBeta” credit strategies enable funds to access low-cost global-credit exposures, while avoiding the drawbacks of market-capitalisation index-based strategies, says Craig Hurt, AXA IM’s […]
I & T NewsAugust 28, 2012
Hedge Funds

Better beta from
less passive indexes

Tim Gardener was disgruntled. “I worry about the corporate bond space. If you invest according to market capitalisation in the corporate bond space, you invest the maximum amount of your allocated money in the most indebted companies, all else being equal,” Gardener said in an interview at AXA Investment Managers’ London office on May 25. “Lending more […]
Simon MummeAugust 27, 2012
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