Catt laps up new Exiles deal May 25, 2010 RUGBY UNION: Mike Catt has signed a contract extension at London Irish – just days after ending his 17-year playing career. The World Cup winner, who joined the Exiles in 2004, has followed the lead of Toby Booth and Dave Ellis in penning long-term deals with the club and will continue his role as a [...]
Embrace the alternative May 25, 2010 A RECENT survey by Mercer, the consultancy, found that nearly 5 per cent of UK pension funds and 14 per cent of European pension funds are looking to increase their allocation to fund of hedge funds. And well they might – over the past 10 years the HFRI Strategic Index, which measures the performance of [...]
CONTAGION IN EUROZONE IS AN OPPORTUNITY May 25, 2010 James Abate, PSigma AM In the investment world, the impact from Greece’s fiscal crisis on the euro (and related concerns about sterling) has led to a stronger US dollar boosting returns for non-dollar based investors in US funds. In spite of this, UK investors’ global portfolios are still significantly underweight the US, relative to the [...]
EU’s Maginot line policy is a fudge May 25, 2010 DICK TURPIN MANAGING DIRECTOR, ARTEMIS SO THE $1 trillion European bailout just isn’t working. So ein Mist, what a dung-heap, mutters German Chancellor Merkel, lugubriously. But investors know that Europe has long excelled at self-delusion. For example, in 1929 somehow the French convinced themselves that the Nazis could be kept out by a wall. As [...]
FUND MANAGEMENT NEWS May 25, 2010 AGRIBUSINESS FUND COMES ONSHORE A new onshore Global Agribusiness Fund by First State Investments will aim to deliver low-risk, long-term returns to UK and European investors from a portfolio of between 25 and 75 stocks. It has announced its intention to take advantage of what it sees as “a combination of rising demand and constrained [...]
Rollercoaster forex markets are here to stay May 25, 2010 IN THE current environment it can be difficult to judge where the financial markets are going even one month ahead let alone 10 years, but that is just what UBS, the investment bank, has done. It published its FX mega trends 2010-2020 report earlier this week, and the overriding theme is volatility. The bank notes [...]
Thai currency flourishing despite political turmoil May 25, 2010 WHEN a country falls into political turmoil, it normally spells bad news for both its markets and its currency as worried investors pull out until the situation has calmed down. Not so Thailand. Admittedly, the South-East Asian country has suffered sharp falls in its stock market – the market itself was closed for two days [...]
BROKEN EURO TROUBLE FOR CHINA AND US May 25, 2010 BORIS SCHLOSSBERG DIRECTOR OF CURRENCY RESEARCH, GFT WITH the yuan up nearly 15 per cent against the euro this year, there was some speculation in the market last week that the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) was a major buyer of the currency as Chinese monetary officials tried to slow the chaotic sell-off. A drop [...]
THE TIPSTER May 25, 2010 THE yen has been appreciating steadily against the greenback since the start of May. There have been some suggestions that the yen is seen as a safe haven but the fundamentals coming out of Japan still all too often make for difficult reading. For example, public debt is extremely high at 180 per cent of [...]
FOREX FLASH May 25, 2010 US-CHINA TALKS CENTRE ON YUAN PEG At the close of talks between the US and China this week, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner voiced a growing hope that China might end its most recent yuan peg to the dollar, telling Bloomberg Television that he was “as confident as I’ve ever been” that Beijing would soon [...]
