CC-BY-SA-2.0, FlickrFoto: nathanmac87
. Beechwood Acquires Old Mutual Bermuda
Beechwood Bermudaannounced the completion of its acquisition of Old Mutual (Bermuda), a Bermuda based provider of insurance and investment products with over $1 billion in assets, which closed for new business in 2009. Beechwood, one of the largest providers of international investment plans, now has over $2 billion in total assets and is featured on the platforms of over 100 banks and brokerage firms around the world.
The transaction, which closed on December 31, 2015, provides for the continuation of service support by Old Mutual for the OMB products over the next three years, supplemented by additional support from Beechwood’s growing wealth management business. As part of the arrangement, Old Mutual will reinsure certain policy guarantees until they mature in 2017 and 2018. Given the continuity of resources, no disruption to client service is anticipated.
“This transaction offers a unique opportunity to strengthen our position as a global leader and demonstrates our dedication to providing innovative financial solutions for international investors,” said Mark Feuer, Chief Executive Officer of Beechwood. “Our scale and resources will allow us to continue to meet and further develop client demand for our products for years to come.”
Over the next several weeks, Beechwood will be contacting OMB’s distribution partners to discuss the transition and introduce Beechwood’s Accumulator Plus and Escalator Plus investment plans, which offer attractive rates and unique investment features such as principal protection guarantees. David Lessing, Executive Vice President of Products and Services at Beechwood, noted, “The growing client demand for the Beechwood products reinforces our decision to make a significant commitment to this business in support of our distribution partners and their financial advisors.”
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Certain regulatory approvals for the transfer of future policy administration arrangements are expected by the end of Q1 2016.
CC-BY-SA-2.0, FlickrEmmanuel Bourdeix, director general de Seeyond y co director de inversiones de Natixis AM. Foto cedida. "Solo una cosa es segura a corto plazo: la incertidumbre está aquí para quedarse… hasta que los datos económicos arrojen luz sobre los fundamentales"
Emmanuel Bourdeix, General Director at Seeyond and Co-CIO at Natixis AM, explains in this interview with Funds Society his view about volatility and the trends we will see in the next months.
Does the volatility has come back to stay? Will it increase in the coming months?
Over 2015 and late 2014, we have observed a period of heightened volatility spikes. Now that the Fed starts normalising its rates after several years of accommodative monetary policy, the beginning of 2016 should probably look very much like the end of 2015, in the sense that market participants will keep on taking a close look at economic data releases to convince themselves that the Fed’s decision was the good one… or not.
More precisely, should strong economic data be published, investors might finally wonder whether the Fed is not behind the curve. Due to this market psychology of “good news is bad news”, we might witness volatility spikes in an environment of robust and favourable fundamentals. Indeed, higher US interest rates as well as an expensive U.S. Dollar could weaken certain market segments, such as emerging markets and U.S. high yield which, in turn, would be a source of contagion and potential increased market volatility.
Conversely, should weak data be released in the coming months on the back of a sustained deterioration of the manufacturing sector in the US, it would mean that the U.S. economy might find itself at the end of an economic cycle with a risk of a recession and that the Fed’s action was inappropriate. To that extent, volatility spikes would occur, with the risk that they become so frequent that it leads over the medium term to a structural adjustment of volatility to the upside.In a nutshell, we believe only one thing is sure over the short term, uncertainty is here to stay… until economic data shed some light on the underlying fundamentals.
Would volatility management be an investment key theme for 2016?
Definitely, volatility will remain a key driver in 2016 in such an uncertain environment. Specialised in extracting value from risk, Seeyond has developed different strategies that can make the most of the current period of low visibility and beyond.For instance, Seeyond’s Minimum Variance strategy offers investors a full exposure to equities with an average risk reduction of 30%. By investing in stocks that display not only low volatilities but also low correlations between each other, we strive to build portfolios that reduces volatility to the lowest, however not at the expense of long term performance: as a matter of fact, academic research, but also empirical observations, suggest that low volatility stocks tend to outperform their peers over long time horizons. This strategy typically fits uncertain environments, like the one we forecast for the coming months.
Beyond, once the economic background gets clearer, be it on the upside or the downside, Seeyond’s multi-asset conservative growth strategy is able to drastically adapt its asset allocation, avoiding markets that would be negatively impacted by the economic environment. Investing in each market independently, the investment process has no structural bias to any asset class in order to provide investors with a robust total return strategy. It combines volatility metrics with fundamentals and momentum indicators, adjusting market views to the underlying risk. To that extent, Seeyond’s multi-asset allocation and minimum variance strategies are complementary and are expected to be a good fit to next year’s environment.
Which are the investment opportunities in the current scenario? Is it more efficient to seek for protection against volatility or to try to take advantage from it?
The arbitrage between seeking protection and exploiting volatility depends on client needs. Intuitively, the cost of holding protection, that is to say the cost of carrying volatility, tends to be expensive in a normalized environment. Investors have to ask themselves if they are not better off selling an overpriced asset. However as structural market crises materialize, investors are potentially compensated for carrying volatility as the crisis unfolds. Volatility has therefore the potential to generate alpha which sets it apart from risk off assets such as cash. This duality is really the corner stone of Seeyond’s investment philosophy around volatility: by looking at the effective cost of carry of volatility instead of its facial level, our strategy is by construction long volatility during a systemic crisis, striving to generate significant value when risk assets are out of favour ; it is short volatility the remainder of the time, striving to provide an additional alpha stream to the overall portfolio.
2016 feels like we are in front of an heightened uncertainty and the outcome from the scenarios we have identified are miles apart. In that context, our firm belief is that allocating to volatility actively has the potential to present investors with the ability to adapt to a favourable scenario while maintaining the ability to generate value should a storm set in.
In this environment how do Seeyond funds help the investors to balance the risk/return equation in their portfolios?
Depending on client needs, balancing risk/return profiles of portfolios can be done on different levels:
– Downside risk protection though structured products (full or partial): investors have a formal protection of their capital whilst being able to participate partially in financial markets’ potential.
– Equity volatility reduction through minimum variance strategies which offer full long-only equity exposure, whilst reducing volatility considerably.
– Risk/return optimisation through total return strategies offering multi asset exposure (equities, fixed income, currencies) based on risk-adjusted allocation
– Active volatility management by investing in equity volatility, an asset class which generates uncorrelated returns to equity markets and thus, significantly enhances the diversification profile of an asset allocation.
It is the 5th anniversary of the Europe Min Variance fund. How has the performance been since the launching?
Since inception and as of end of Sept 2015, Seeyond Europe Minvariance has outperformed its benchmark by more than 15% and reduced volatility by around 30% vs the MSCI Europe NR EUR over the period. Despite varying market configurations, and strong performance shifts encountered over the last 5 years due to various events (among which eurozone debt crisis, FED tapering and European QE, China’s “Black Monday”, etc.), the strategy succeeded in generating consistent returns proving the relevance of its core foundation: focusing on managing the overall level of portfolio volatility does indeed benefit from superior long term risk-adjusted returns. The fund also demonstrated its ability to adapt over different market environments through its reactive allocation from a geographic or industry point of view.
How does the other fund, which invests in derivatives, work? What kind of investors profile and portfolios is it recommended for?
Seeyond’s equity volatility strategy provides investors with a diversification tool that can be used as part of their allocation. It invests in equity volatility actively through listed and liquid instruments, and aims to provide diversification during structural crises. During normalised market conditions, we strive to harvest the equity volatility risk premium in order to generate a moderate total return.
Though this strategy hasn’t had so far the opportunity to experiment a strategic bear market (comparable to 2008 or 2011) in order to demonstrate its ability to generate a decent crisis alpha, it hasn’t exhibited any significant cost of opportunity in comparison with money market investments since its inception in 2012. Therefore, we would recommend this strategy to investors who still hold large portions of cash in their asset allocation: they could arbitrage part of this cash into Seeyond’s equity volatility strategy without any substantial cost while integrating a source of active diversification, should equities enter an undesired bear market.
Global asset manager Legg Mason Inc is in exclusive talks to buy a majority stake in real estate investment manager Clarion Partners LLC in a deal valuing the company at about US$ 850 million, according to Bloomberg. Clarion, which is based in New York and invests in office and retail related real estate, has about US$ 38 billion in assets under management, according to its website.
Under the terms being discussed, the asset manager would buy 80% of the firm from Lightyear Capital, while New York-based Clarion’s current management, headed by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Furnary, will retain 20%. Back in November, Reuters reported in that private equity firm Lightyear Capital was looking to sell its majority stake in Clarion Partners LLC for around US$ 800 million. A deal could be announced as early as this month.
Lightyear helped Clarion’s management buy the firm from its previous partner, Dutch financial services company ING Groep NV in 2011. When that deal was struck, the price and ownership structure were not disclosed. Neither Legg Mason, Lightyear or Clarion have made any comments on this matter.
CC-BY-SA-2.0, FlickrPhoto: Chuck Coker
. House Prices Continue a Slow Recovery, IMF Says
Globally, house prices continue a slow recovery, according to The Global House Price Index, released by IMF in December. The Index, an equally weighted average of real house prices in nearly 60 countries, inched up slowly during the past two years but has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels.
If prices went up in The United States, Colombia and Spain, in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru they decreased. The areas with the biggest growth were Qatar, Ireland and Hong Kong while the biggest decreases took place in Ucraine, Russia and Latvia.
As noted in previous quarterly reports, the overall index conceals divergent patterns: over the past year, house prices rose in two-thirds of the countries included in the index and fell in the other one-third.
Credit growth has been strong in many countries. As noted in July’s quarterly report, house prices and credit growth have gone hand-in-hand over the past five years. However, credit growth is not the only predictor for the extent of house price growth; several other factors appear to be at play. While in Brazil credit and prices went down, and in Colombia and The United States both grew, in Spain prices grew while credit decreased, and in Mexico priced did not while credit did.
For OECD countries, house prices have grown faster than incomes and rents in almost half of the countries.House price-to income and house price-to-rent ratios are highly correlated, as documented in the previous quarterly report.
CC-BY-SA-2.0, FlickrEnrique Rodríguez. Enrique Rodríguez Will Manage a Mexico and Colombia Fund by Beamonte Investments
Beamonte Investments has announced the launch of Venture Academy Fund (“VAF”), a Venture Capital Fund targeting opportunities in Mexico and Colombia.
VAF will target high-growth startups and ventures that take advantage of market opportunities through online platforms, mobile applications, technology, and others. The fund will focus on Series A investments, as competition is lower in this section of the VC market. The VC market is at a growth stage were VAF can enter and take advantage of the favorable entrepreneurial ecosystem in Mexico and Colombia to generate returns for investors.
Enrique Rodriguez, a former investment banker of Grupo Bursatil Mexicano, will lead the Fund. Rodriguez has several years of experience in structuring funds, debt issuing, IPOs, and Mergers and Acquisitions. Rodriguez holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from ITAM as well as a MBA from Hult International Business School. “I’m exited to be leading an effort like Venture Academy Fund with a platform like Beamonte Investments, one of the premiere Investments firms operating in Mexico with an exeptional track record,” said Rodriguez.
VAF will target to raise between 10 to 15M USD and will make investments between 500 thousand and 1.5M USD each. The primary sourse of deal flow will be Venture Academy bootcamps over the next few years. Venture Academy is an educational platform for training entrepreneurs how to raise money through a four day intensive boot camp designed to provide attendees with the information, guidance, and advice to run their businesses. Claudia Yan Director of Venture Academy, an educational program launched by Beamonte in 2014 that educates entrepreneurs in Mexico and is planning to start operations by 2016 commented, “VAF is the perfect match for Venture Academy. We educate and VAF will invest in the talent is perfect way to create synergies and help entrepreneurs of both countries to achieve their goals.”
Luis Felipe Trevino, Senior Managing Director of Beamonte Investments commented, “We are thrilled to announce VAF along side with Enrique and Claudia we believe is a perfect match to capture premiere deals in Mexico and Colombia, two of the highest growing economies in Latin America. Beamonte has a significant track record in the region and we believe that we can add a tremendous amount of value to entrepreneurs in both countries.”
On his weekly commentary, Bob Doll, chief equity strategist and senior portfolio manager at Nuveen Investments, expressed his thoughts on what happened in the markets during 2015, and shared his predictions for 2016.
For investors, this past year was difficult, but not disastrous. A weather-induced U.S. economic slowdown kicked off 2015, and headlines declared a possible messy exit by Greece from the Eurozone. During the summer, a decelerating Chinese economy led to the surprising devaluation of the yuan. In August, this helped trigger a massive drop in U.S. equity markets. As the fall began, investors grew uneasy over the prospects of Federal Reserve tightening. A late-year meltdown in commodities hurt resource-based industries and economies around the world. Geopolitical crises, terrorism and a bizarre U.S. political backdrop all helped boost uncertainty.
The chief headwind for equities was weak corporate earnings. Not surprisingly, the rising U.S. dollar and falling oil prices hurt the energy, materials and industrials sectors. However, these same factors failed to lift consumer-oriented and other “energy-using” sectors. The key to determining the direction of equities next year may well be the direction of corporate earnings.
Despite the negativity and uncertainty, the investing world saw several bright spots in 2015. The U.S. economy grew modestly and unemployment declined significantly. The housing and banking sectors improved. Consumer spending remained strong. The federal deficit fell sharply. And equity markets proved to be resilient, despite downward pressure. Will next year be dominated by the negatives? Will the positives win? Or will confusion and uncertainty continue? With this backdrop, Rob Doll offers his predictions for 2016:
U.S. real GDP remains below 3% and nominal GDP below 5% for an unprecedented tenth year in a row.
U.S. Treasury rates rise for a second year, but high yield spreads fall.
S&P 500 earnings make limited headway as consumer spending advances are partially offset by oil, the dollar and wage rates.
For the first time in almost 40 years, U.S. equities experience a single-digit percentage change for the second year in a row.
Stocks outperform bonds for the fifth consecutive year.
Non-U.S. equities outperform domestic equities, while non-U.S. fixed income outperforms domestic fixed income.
Information technology, financials and telecommunication services outperform energy, materials and utilities.
Geopolitics, terrorism and cyberattacks continue to haunt investors but have little market impact.
The federal budget deficit rises in dollars and as a percentage of GDP for the first time in seven years.
Republicans retain the House and the Senate and capture the White House.
Overall, Rob Doll expects that 2016 will present difficulties for investors, but he still believes there are reasons for optimism. If globaleconomic growth broadens and improves, that could allow corporate revenues and earnings to strengthen. Such a backdrop, combined with still-low inflation and still-easy monetary policy, should allow equities to improve further. Rob Doll encourages investors to maintain overweight positions in equities, and expects 2016 will be another year in which selectivity is paramount to investors’ success.
Belgian companies Petercam Institutional Asset Management and Degroof Fund Management Company have merged on 4 January to form one entity called Degroof Petercam Asset Management (Degroof Petercam AM).
The merger comes in the aftermath of these between Belgian groups Bank Degroof and Petercam that has taken place in October 2015.
Degroof Petercam AM has €25bn of assets under management and tallies 140 employees.
Its management board is composed of president Hugo Lasat, Tomás Murillo, Thomas Palmblad, Guy Lerminiaux, Philippe Denef, Peter De Coensel and Vincent Planche.
Photo: Sarath Kuchi
. Houston and Washington DC: The Best Cities in the US to Get Rich
Not in every city you can build a fortune. Even if the biggest cities in the US are the most attractive for those willing to do it, you should analyze a series of criteria in order to choose the right one. Houston, Washington DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and New York are the best 5 cities in the country to build a fortune, according to Bankrate. Dallas-Fort Worth, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago, complete the Top 10.
In order to rank the 18 largest metro areas in the country, Bankrate analyzed after-tax savable income, the job market, human capital (indicating available educational opportunities for career advancement), access to financial services, participation in retirement savings plans, and the local housing market in each city.
CC-BY-SA-2.0, FlickrPhoto: Scott Beale. Henderson: “Companies That Are Reliant Solely on A Cyclical Upturn to Grow Their Revenues Present an Elevated Level of Risk”
Ian Warmerdam and Ronan Kelleher, Managers of the Henderson Global Growth Strategy, believe that concentrating on secular growth in 2016, particularly within innovative themes, while maintaining a strict valuation discipline, is a prudent approach to generating attractive long-term returns.
What lessons have you learned from 2015?
2015 has again felt like a year of mediocre global economic growth, broadly speaking, and we believe that companies that are reliant solely on a cyclical upturn to grow their revenues present an elevated level of risk. This year has reinforced our belief that concentrating on truly secular growth, while maintaining a strict valuation discipline, is a prudent approach to generating attractive long-term returns.
Are you more or less positive than you were this time last year, and why?
We claim no ability to predict the short-term direction of the markets so our strategy remains unchanged. We continue to operate with our five-year investment horizon at a stock level and have confidence that our philosophy and process will continue to deliver strong absolute and relative returns over this longer-term timeframe.
What are the key themes likely to shape your asset class going forward and how are you likely to position your portfolios as a result?
Our strategy remains to avoid making major macroeconomic calls, and to instead focus on using our bottom-up approach to find companies that are benefitting from underappreciated secular growth and high barriers to entry, at attractive valuations. As we look into 2016, we continue to see compelling investment opportunities within our five existing themes: Healthcare Innovation, Internet Transformation, Emerging Markets Growth, Paperless Payment and Energy Efficiency.
Within Healthcare Innovation, for example, we are attracted by the demographic changes at play as an ageing global population struggles to contain ever rising healthcare costs. Increases in life expectancy mean that the global 60+ age group is expected to double by 2050 to two billion people. CVS Health, the US pharmacy chain, provides an integrated healthcare service for its customers and looks set to benefit from these demographic shifts.
Rightmove is a leading online UK property listings company that sits within our Internet Transformation theme and should continue to benefit from the structural shift in advertising spend from offline to online. Within Energy Efficiency investments include companies that increase vehicle efficiency such as Continental, a Germany-based automotive supplier, Valeo, a multi-national automotive supplier based in France, along with Delphi, a US auto component manufacturer.
Despite a general consensus in the financial advice community that saving for retirement should trump paying for a child’s college education, nearly half of Americans disagree. According to a recent poll from RBC Wealth Management-U.S. conducted by Ipsos, 49 percent of Americans place greater importance on helping their children pay for their education than they do on saving for their own retirement.
“As the cost of a college education in the U.S. continues to rise, parents will naturally want to help their kids get through school without accumulating a mountain of debt,” said John Taft, CEO of RBC Wealth Management in the U.S. “But with the gap between how much Americans have saved and what they will need to retire comfortably widening, we advise that people make funding their own retirement a priority. There are no grants, scholarships, or federally guaranteed loans to support them when they leave the workforce.”
Millennials (ages 18 to 34) are the most likely to prioritize financing their children’s education ahead of their own retirement. In fact, 60 percent of Americans in that age group said saving for their kids’ education was more important to them, compared with 43 percent of GenXers (ages 35 to 54) and only 28 percent of Baby Boomers (ages 55 and older).
“These results likely also reflect both philosophical and practical differences between generations,” said Malia Haskins of the Wealth Strategies Group at RBC Wealth Management-U.S. “For Millennials, retirement is much farther away than the more immediate challenge of putting kids through college, so it makes sense that they would put retirement on the back burner. Baby Boomers tend to believe that children should be self-motivated and should have some skin in the game when paying for college. GenXers, meanwhile, are somewhere in the middle. They want to pay for most if not all of college costs for their children, but they also may be nearing retirement and wanting to balance the two goals.”
While saving for retirement should be the priority, by planning and setting realistic goals it is possible for many families to meet both objectives, Haskins says. Planning is especially critical for families with lower household incomes. According to the RBC Wealth Management survey, Americans with household incomes under $50,000 were the most likely (57 percent) to place saving for a child’s education ahead of their own retirement needs.
“Sometimes families find they can fund their retirement and still contribute to a child’s education,” Haskins said. “By looking ahead a little bit, it’s easier to get an overall sense of whether their goals are realistic.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of RBC from October 6 to October 9, 2015. For the survey, a sample of n=2009 Americans was interviewed online via Ipsos’s American online panel, of which 569 are parents with children in the household. The precision of Ipsos online surveys is measured using a Bayesian credibility interval. In this case, with a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within ± 4.7 percentage points percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had all American parents been polled.
