Newton Investment Management, filiale de BNY Mellon Asset Management, indique avoir recruté Tracey Dominick pour son équipe global research où elle sera responsable de trouver idées pour le secteur de la consummation. Elle était analyste internationale spécialiste des sociétés de biens de consommation durables et discrétionnaires chez Fidelity Investments.Newton IM affiche des encours de 34 milliards de livres

BlackRock a annoncé mardi soir avoir reçu notification écrite de Barclays Plc lui signifiant que le conseil d’administration de la banque britannique avait accepté son offre d’acquisition de Barclays Global Investors (BGI) et qu’il recommandera aux actionnaires lors de l’assemblée générale extraordinaire de début août d’apporter leurs titres à l’offre de BlackRock.Cela signifie que Barclays devra payer le dédit convenu à CVC, qui avait fait une première offre concernant les ETF de la marque iShares.

Selon Les Echos, l’agence de notation américaine reste prudente sur les perspectives des banques européennes en 2009 en raison notamment de la montée du coût du risque sur les entreprises et les particuliers. Ce dernier avait doublé en 2008 pour atteindre 128 milliards d’euros et il pourrait s’alourdir de 50 milliards, si le rythme de progression des pertes sur créances douteuses reste le même qu’au second semestre 2008. Le soutien des Etats dans le rating des établissements, notamment en Grande-Bretagne, en France, en Allemagne, en Irlande ou en Suisse, reste déterminant.

Le DB Platinum CROCI Carbon 100 Euro TR Fund (long-only) et le DB Platinum CROCI Carbon Alpha TR Fund (long-short), deux fonds conformes à la directive OPCVM III, viennent d'être lancés par la Deutsche Bank. Ils fournissent aux investisseurs une exposition actions à des entreprises dont la valorisation est attrayante et qui se caractérisent par de faibles émissions de gaz à effet de serre, les données concernant les émissions ayant été développées en coopération avec Trucost Plc.Le fonds long-only adopte une approche «best-of-breed» en utilisant la méthode de selection CROCI (Cash Return on Capital Invested) pour choisir les 100 actions de sociétés qui affichent des taux d'émission inférieurs à celui de leur secteur respectif. Le fonds long-short utilise une approche mixte combinant les facteurs CROCI et émissions. Les positions à l’achat ou à la vente sont choisies de manière a constituer un portefeuille neutre selon les marchés, les régions et les secteurs, l’exposition étant calculée pour que le portefeuille se maintienne à l’intérieur d’un budget de volatilité de 5 %.La Deutsche Bank précise que l’indice du fonds long-only a affiché une performance de 17,3 % depuis le début de l’année (au 2 juin) tandis que celui de la stratégie «alpha» gagnait 3 %.Les fonds disposent d’un agrément de commercialisation en Allemagne et au Luxembourg. Ailleurs en Europe, ils sont disponibles selon les modalités prévalant pour les placements privés. Caractéristiques Dénomination : DB Platinum CROCI Carbon 100 Euro Total Return Fund Code ISIN LU0427245567 (retail) LU0427246706 (institutionnels) Frais de gestion 1,50 % (retail) 0,75 % (institutionnels) Trailer 0,75 % (retail) TER 1,70 % (retail) 0,91 % (institutionnels) Caractéristiques Dénomination : DB Platinum CROCI Carbon Alpha Total Return Fund Code ISIN LU0427247266 (retail) LU0427248827 (institutionnels) Frais de gestion 1,75 % (retail) 1 % (institutionnels) Trailer 0,75 % TER 1,95 % (retail) 1,16 % (institutionnels)

Le rallye des marchés actions en mars a permis aux fonds de pension européens, notamment aux Pays-Bas, au Royaume-Uni, en Suisse et en Suède, d’améliorer leurs niveaux de financement, rapporte Financial News, citant diverses sources. Mais les analystes préviennent que le secteur n’est pas encore tiré d’affaire et qu’il reste vulnérable en cas de nouvelle chute des cours.

Quatre finalistes sont en course pour acquérir l’activité japonaise de gestion d’actifs de Citigroup, Nikko Asset Management, rapporte le Financial Times. Il s’agirait de Nomura, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group et T&D Holdings. La banque US cherche à obtenir un prix de 100 milliards de yens.

En mars, la Financière Arbevel a été vendue à Jean-Baptiste Delabare et Sébastien Lalevée, qui ont pris la direction de la société en remplacement de Jean Berruyer, parti à la retraite.

Expansión rapporte que la Justice américaine a approuvé le concordat entre Optimal, une société de gestion du groupe Santander, et Irving Picard, l’administrateur judiciaire chargé de liquider l’empire Madoff. L’accord conclu fin mai prévoyait que le Santander paierait 235 millions de dollars, ce qui correspond au montant qui avait été remboursé durant les trois mois précédant la découverte de l’affaire Madoff. Irving Picard a précisé que les 235 millions correspondent à 85 % de ce qu’il avait primitivement exigé du Santander.

Pour tenter de reconquérir sa clientèle de hedge funds, Morgan Stanley prévoit d’annoncer mercredi que les clients de sa division de prime brokerage pourront désormais détenir une partie de leurs actifs dans le Morgan Stanley Trust National Association, un trust détenu par la banque. Précédemment, les actifs étaient détenus par les pôles courtage de Morgan Stanley. Cette mesure vise à rassurer les clients, inquiets d’une éventuelle répétition de la panique provoquée par la faillite de Lehman.

According to the edition of the monthly Lipper survey undertaken on 1 June, Spanish asset managers increased their allocations to equities in May to 36.56% from 34.21% in April, Cinco Días reports. Meanwhile, they reduced their allocation to cash to 26% from 32.01%. Exposure to bonds rose to 34.56% from 30.88%, while exposure to alternative assets (hedge funds, real estate, and private equity) was increased to 2.98% from 2.90%. However, 46.15% of major asset management firms say they are still underweight in equities, and 69.34% of them say they continue to be overweight in cash.

Four finalists are in the running to acquire the Japanese asset management business of Citigroup, Nikko Asset Management, the Financial Times reports. The candidates are Nomura, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and T&D Holdings. The US bank is asking JPY100bn for the firm.

The Swiss Stephan Zimmermann, a member of the supervisory board at UBS Deutschland, will be resigning from this position at the end of June to become chairman of the managing board, replacing Jan-Christian Dreesen, the Börsen-Zeitung reports. The bank has offered no explanation for the departure of Dreesen, though it says he and the firm parted on good terms.

Bordier Gestion Privée, a French affiliate of Bordier & Cie, a Geneva private bank founded in 1844, has been granted an extension to its collective management license by the French financial market regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), to allow it to manage OPCVM, FCP and Sicav type investment funds. Previously, Bordier Gestion Privée, founded in 2006, offered wealth management. “We provide mandates for our private clients,” explains Christophe Burtin, CEO of Bordier Gestion Privée. The additional license for collective management will allow the French affiliate of the Swiss establishment to respond to the needs of two families which have asked it to take over management of dedicated funds managed by other entities. At the same time, “we also wanted to create an open-ended FCP replicating our discretionary management. With no asset allocation constraints, the fund will be able to invest in equities and bonds, OPCVM funds managed by third parties, and up to 10% in funds of hedge funds,” says Burtin. The product, launched in September, will be managed by Burtin himself and Charles Brunswick, two former managers from Rothschild & Cie Gestion who joined Bordier in July 2008. This will allow Bordier Gestion Privée to serve a larger client base than its own, including private clients as well as independent financial advisors (IFAs). “The fund will be listed on several platforms,” says Burtin. The open-ended fund is expected to be the management firm’s only product, says Burtin. “Like our parent company, we do not want to construct a product range,” he says. Bordier Gestion Privée currently manages assets of EUR200m, two thirds of it on behalf of residents and one third for international clients. Bordier & Cie manages over CHF8.5bn.

HSBC Assurances has created IFA Services, an entity dedicated to networks of independent financial advisors (IFAs), and which aims to become their privileged interlocutor. Beginning in September, special life insurance and capitalisation products will be offered to them. HSBC Assurances IFA Services will also offer the entrepreneur package, created specially for IFAs. The package of services includes the 4 key components for transmission of an enterprise: legal and tax advising, coaching, business evaluation, and a mergers and acquisitions component.

Expansión reports that the US courts have approved an agreement between Optimal, a management firm of the Santander group, and Irving Picard, the legal administrator in charge of liquidating the Madoff empire. The agreement, reached at the end of May, states that Santander will pay USD235m, which corresponds to the total amount received by the firm in redemptions in the three months before the Madoff fraud was discovered. Picard says that the USD235m corresponds to 85% of what he had initially asked Santander to pay back.

Newton Investment Management, an affiliate of BNY Mellon Asset Management, has hired Tracey Dominick for its global research team. In her new position, Dominick will be responsible for finding ideas for the consumer sector. She was previously an international analyst specialised in durable and discretionary consumer goods at Fidelity Investments. Newton IM manages assets of GBP34bn.

BlackRock announced that it has received written notice from Barclays PLC that Barclays’ board of directors has accepted BlackRock’s offer to acquire Barclays Global Investors (BGI). Barclays also notified BlackRock that its board will recommend the transaction to Barclays’ shareholders for approval at a special meeting to be held in early August 2009. Barclays’ acceptance of BlackRock’s offer followed satisfaction of the provisions required under a “go-shop” arrangement with respect to an offer previously received by Barclays for iShares, BGI’s ETF platform, says the press release. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter 2009 following approval by Barclays’ shareholders, the receipt of client consents and regulatory approvals, and satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

The two former heads of multi-asset class management at Insight, Patrick and Ana Cukic Armstrong, who left Insight last year, have founded Armstrong Investment Management, Investment Week reports. They will offer multi-asset class retirement and wealth management products. Armstrong IM has recruited Toby Haye, also a former Insight employee.

Following its acquisition of SGAM’s UK activities in April, GLG Partners on Monday unveiled its range of UK equities products, MoneyMarketing reports. John White and Jason McKay, co-managers of the GLG Alpha Select and UK Select Equity funds, will take over five UK equities funds previously managed by SGAM: UK Growth, UK Active 350, UK Income, UK Small Companies and UK Special Opportunities.

Paul Shuttleworth, co-lead manager of sterling activities at BlackRock in London, will become the sole head and lead portfolio manager for these activities after the departure of Andrew Belshaw, who was investment head of sterling fixed income and manager of the BlackRock Securities fund, Business Week reports. Belshaw has joined Western Asset Management, where he becomes one of the heads of the investment management team.

In May, hedge funds soaked up net cash inflows for the first time in 10 months, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing Eurekahedge. Inflows totalled USD19.3bn, offsetting USD8bn in outflows. In May, hedge funds also delivered their best performance in several years, and the pace of fund closures slowed.

Credit Suisse/Tremont and Barclay both show significant gains for hedge funds in May. According to the former, average performance measured 4.06%, bringing the total since the beginning of the year to 6.72%. These monthly gains are the largest since February 2000. The Barclay index, for its part, is up 5.77%, putting gains since the beginning of the year at 10.75%. In both cases, emerging markets strategies showed the best results in May, with 6.96% according to Credit Suisse/Tremont and 10.72% according to Barclay.

Laffitte Capital Management has reopened its merger arbitrage fund Laffitte Risk Arbitrage, which was suspended on 15 September, following the bankruptcy of its prime broker, Lehman Brothers. The reopening of the fund concludes a long and complicated legal process which raised questions about the responsibilities of custodians in France (see previous articles on this subject). In the end, RBC Dexia, Laffitte’s depository, was required to restore assets for which custody was outsourced to Lehman Brothers to the Aria EL fund. Now that this sentence has been carried out, Laffitte Capital is able to reopen its fund at last, ending nine months of uncertainty. David Lenfant, managing partner at Laffitte, is relieved and satisfied, he says. During the fund’s closure it gained 2.5%. The reopening comes at a good time for mergers, particularly in the United States, Laffitte’s preferred market. Laffitte is also planning to launch an event-driven equities arbitrage product in the form of an UCITS fund.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday agreed agreed to allow Bernard Madoff to settle civil fraud charges without admitting to any wrong-doing, the Financial Times reports. The financier will be forbidden from having any future associations with investment or brokerage businesses.

The DB Platinum CROCI Carbon 100 Euro TR Fund (long-only) and DB Platinum CROCI Carbon Alpha TR Fund (long-short), two UCITS III-compliant funds, have been launched by Deutsche Bank. They provide investors with exposure to shares in companies whose valuation is attractive and which stand out for their low emissions of greenhouse gases. The data on emissions were developed in cooperation with Trucost Plc. The long-only fund adopts a best-of-breed approach, using the CROCI (Cash Return On Cash Invested) selection method to choose shares in 100 companies which have lower emissions rates than their respective sectors. The long/short fund uses a mixed approach that combines CROCI and emissions factors. Long and short positions are chosen to construct a portfolio which is neutral on markets, regions and sectors, while exposure is calculated to ensure that the portfolio remains within a volatility budget of 5%. Deutsche Bank says that the index for the long-only fund has posted returns of 17.3% since the beginning of the year (as of 2 June), while the alpha strategy gained 3%. The funds are licensed for sale in Germany and Luxembourg. Elsewhere in Europe, they are available according to the regulations governing private placements. Details Name : DB Platinum CROCI Carbon 100 Euro Total Return Fund ISIN code LU0427245567 (retail) LU0427246706 (institutional) Management fee 1.50% (retail) 0.75% (institutional) Trailer 0.75% (retail) TER 1.70% (retail) 0.91% (institutional) Details Name : DB Platinum CROCI Carbon Alpha Total Return Fund ISIN Code LU0427247266 (retail) LU0427248827 (institutional) Management fee 1.75% (retail) 1% (institutional) Trailer 0.75% TER 1.95% (retail) 1.16% (institutional)

ETFlab Investment GmbH, an affiliate of DekaBank, announced on Tuesday that it listed six new ETFs on the XTF segment of the Xetra electronic platform from Deutsche Börse on 16 June. All six products replicate MSCI indexes for the United States, Europe and Japan, and their midcaps counterparts. The German-registered funds are denominated in US dollars, Euros and Japanese yen. Management commission is 0.30% each for the four United States and Europe products, while the two Japanese funds carry fees of 0.50%.The XTF segment now lists 459 products.

Crédit Agricole Asset Management (CAAM) announced on Tuesday that it is releasing in Germany the Luxembourg versions of two stock-picking funds which already existed as French products. The Select Europe and Select Euro sub-funds of the Luxembourg Sicav CAAM Funds already have respective assets of EUR23m and EUR18m as of 15 June. Their French counterparts, CAAM Select Europe and CAAM Select Euro, have assets under management of EUR209m and EUR71.9m, respectively.

Le Temps reports that a delegation from Switzerland, led by Jürg Giraudi, head of international tax agreements for the Swiss federal contributions administration, is in Washington to negotiate a new double taxation agreement between Switzerland and the United States. Switzerland needs the agreement in order to rapidly get it off the grey list of OECD countries with substandard transparency in these areas.

The German management firm Commerz Real (Commerzbank group) has announced that it has invested about EUR52.5m in an office building under construction (13 stories, 13,000 square metres) in Liverpool. The property, slated for completion in first quarter 2011, will be added to the portfolio of the open-ended fund hausInvest europa (EUR9bn). The property is leased for 30 years to the Merseyside Integrated Transport Authority (MITA), which operates the urban transport for Liverpool and the county of Merseyside.Hans-Joachim Kühl, a board member, says Commerz Real is planning to dedicate EUR1bn to EUR1.5bn of investment to its open-ended real estate funds this year.

At the end of 2008, according to the annual report of the ALFI association, German asset management firms had assets fo EUR328bn in Luxembourg-registered funds, putting them ahead of their US (EUR306bn) and Swiss (EUR271bn) counterparts. Total assets under management represent EUR1.56trn, which is EUR500bn or 24% less than on 31 December 2007. Net redemptions since that time have totalled EUR77bn. The Börsen-Zeitung says this first place finish for German fund management firms is due to the fact that their assets contracted by only 16%, while assets for American firms contracted by 22%. French asset management firms renked seventh, after Belgium, the UK and Italy.