As investors slowly rotate out of the stay-at-home and tech stocks, out-of-favor issues have gained momentum. Year to date through the period ended August 5, 2021, the average equity fund has posted a 14.03% return. However, with Treasury rates moving lower despite increasing inflation pressures and coronavirus cases on the rise, the move to out-of-favor issues has waxed and waned. This is because investors are attempting to assess the direction Federal Reserve Board policymakers will take and how the new delta strain of the coronavirus will impact the reopening efforts of the global economy. While the average Energy MLP Fund

Investors are getting antsy about commercial property. As working and social habits are upended by COVID, businesses are reappraising how much office space they need, while shopping centres, cinemas, and restaurants and other food outlets have seen footfall drop from a continuous heavy drumming to a light patter. On the other hand, investors with overweights to warehousing linked to online trade must be feeling quite pleased with themselves—as indicated by Ocado’s share price more or less doubling year to date. There will be winners and losers in the commercial property stakes—but arguably more of the latter. Hence the nervousness, with

Property and real estate investments are in general considered as safe-haven investments because bricks and mortar are real assets which can survive a storm in the equity markets. This claim can be considered as true if an investor invests directly into property. But as fund managers try to optimize the return for their investors, this might not be true for direct property funds and real estate investment trust (REIT) funds investing in commercial properties in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under current economic conditions, the optimization of returns— especially the use of leverage (debt capital)—may cause a problem for

The latest headlines about property funds in the UK seem to indicate the herd behavior of investors may lead to the next shake up of the fund industry in Europe. The M&G Property Portfolio fund became the first fund product to be gated because it couldn’t meet the demand for share redemptions. This all happened after the GAM scandal and the resultant pressure that was put on fund liquidity for some alternative UCITS funds, as well as the gating of the Woodford Equity Income Fund. On one hand, it is understandable that professional fund selectors sell their holdings in funds

  Key Highlights & Observations Please see attached for the latest Global Fund Market Statistics Report for September 2017 from Lipper. Please feel free to attribute any of the content to Otto Christian Kober, Global Head of Methodology at Lipper, who wrote this report. Key highlights below: Fund Market Overall Assets under management in the global collective investment funds market grew US$573.5 billion (+1.3%) for September and stood at US$45.37 trillion at the end of the month. Estimated net inflows accounted for US$70.7 billion, while US$502.8 billion was added because of the positively performing markets. Included in the overall year-to-date