Skandia Investment Group’s (SIG) Francois Zagame has awarded Peter Higgins of Wellington Management a GBP52m mandate within its Skandia Global Dynamic Equity Fund. The addition of Higgins provides further diversification to the investment styles of the US allocations within the fund. SIG has funded the mandate by reallocating assets from the other US allocations in the fund.Higgins and his team focus on finding out of favour companies, with valuation anomalies. The strategy is aggressive, invested in 50 to 80 stocks and has typically exhibited a high beta. It is this aggressive strategy and investment philosophy which SIG believes will add value to the fund.

The head of discretionary sales in London and the South-East region of England at Ignis Asset Management, Alisdair Bell, has left the firm which he joined about six years ago, Fund Web reports. Bell will take on more important responsibilities at a company which he has declined to identify.

The asset management firm Polar Capital will be launching its first global equity fund, Citywire reports. To manage the new product, it has recruited two managers, Andy MacKirdy and Christophe Williams. They will be assisted by Andrew Holliman, manager of the Polar Capital North American fund and a former member of the same team as the two recruits from Baillie Gifford. The new fund will be launched in the next few months, but the asset management firm has not yet decided which countries the product will be registered in, a spokesperson for Polar Capital has told Citywire.

Sutesh Sharma, former head of proprietary trading at Citigroup, will this autumn be launching his own hedge fund in London, Portman Square Capital, with about USD500m in capital, the Financial Times reports. Sharma will be joined by a team of Citi traders. Lalit Das and Yusaf Khan, former managers from Old Lane, will be partners. Nine others will be a part of the adventure.

ING Investment Managers has won a EUR400m mandate from the Luxembourg general pension regime compensation fund, to manage a portfolio of global equities, Citywire reports. Hendrick-Jan Boer will manage the portfolio.

The Lyxor hedge fund index in May shows losses of 0.55%, following losses of 0.02% in April, but it still shows returns of 0.96% in the first five months of the year. Lyxor says that there are still a few safe havens in alternative strategies, and that five of the 14 strategies covered by sub-indices show gains for May, including CTA Short Term and CTA Long Term, with returns of 5.35% and 2.21%, respectively.In the first five months of the year, the best results were for distressed (+4.19%), fixed income arbitrage (+3.61%) and credit strateegies (+3.07%). The only strategy to show losses is Long/Short Equity Variable Bias, with losses of 0.80%.

Rumours about the exit of TCW from the Société Générale family are circulating once again. According to reports by Reuters, cited by Agefi, at least three private equity firms are said to have made offers for the California firm, which had USD128bn in assets under management as of 31 March 2012. One of them is rumoured to be Clayton Dubilier & Rice. The wholly financed bids are said to be in the range of USD700m. The firms cited had no comment when contacted by Agefi.

Following the departure of Joseph Tse, who is planning to leave the asset management industry, Fidelity will on 1 July transfer management of the Greater China Fund to Raymond Ma, and the Asian Special Situations fund to Suranjan Mukherjee, Das Investment reports.Ma is the manager of the China Consumer Fund, while Mukherjee is a manager of institutional portfolios.

State Street Global Services is planning to extend its back-office outsourcing services to Taiwan, where companies specialised in international custody generally have difficulty gaining market share, Asian Investor reports.

“At Pimco, we think that real interest rates will remain low for a very long time, the result of a policy of confiscation by central banks. The short end of the curve is not currently attractive, since it is highly sensitive to changes in commodity prices, particularly those related to energy, such as oil. In the current economic environment, we do not predict any drastic increase in the price of these commodities. In this context, the real return team at Pimco is focusing on a 10-year horizon,” Jérémie Banet, senior vice president, portfolio management in Newport Beach, California, tells Newsmanagers.Banet belongs to the real return team at Pimco, which is composed of seven people, “half of them portfolio managers specialised in commodities, and the other half experts in the area of inflation-linked bonds (known as ‘linkers’).”Pimco is a leader in the management of real return strategies. This includes management of dedicated mandates and of open-ended funds totalling in the tens of billions of dollars. “We have mostly one mutual fund in the United States and one global fund in Europe. We also have a commodity fund which invests its collateral in linkers,” says Banet.“Since the beginning of the year,” the portfolio manager continues, “we have seen strong demand for real return strategies, and we have seen inflows of USD1bn for our global real return fund in Europe; our mutual fund specialised in TIPS in the United States has taken on USD500m, not counting important mandates from central banks and sovereign wealth funds.”

In the second week of June, investors avoided European funds due to uncertainties surrounding the euro zone (elections in Greece, a downgrade in the Spanish sovereign debt rating). European bond funds have seen redemptions at a level never before observed since the end of December 2011, and European equity funds have seden their sixth week of outflows in the past twelve weeks, according to estimates from EPFR Global.Equity funds overall have seen net inflows of USD10.91bn in the week to 13 June, a level not seen for over a year, but three quarters of these inflows were for US equity funds.Bond funds in the week under review attracted USD1.46bn, but European bond funds saw redemptions totalling over USD1bn. Once again, US funds were favoured by investors, with inflows of over USD2bn.Money market funds, for their part, finished the week ending on 13 June with redemptions totalling USD11bn, as outflows from US money market funds more than offset subscriptions to European money market funds.

For an undisclosed amount, Deutsche Postbank has sold its asset management operation to DWS (another affiliate of Deutsche Bank). The vendor indicated on Friday that the sale concerned 56 open-ended and institutional funds, representing EUR7.7bn in assets, and administration of its open-ended funds and affiliates in Frankfurt and Luxembourg. The transaction, which is still pending approval from the Luxembourg authorities, is expected to be closed during third quarter 2012.

The AGM of the German BAI alternative management association on 14 June elected its new board, which is enlarged from five to six members and includes three new members, as Dietmar Bahr and Dirk Söhnholz did not wish to run for a new mandate, for personal reasons.Achim Pütz, a partner at Dechert, remains as president. The three newly-elected vice presidents are Joachim Kayser (partner at PwC), Wolfgang Leoni (CIO at Sal. Oppenheim), and Rolf Tilmes (a dean at EBS European Business School). The AGM has also re-elected Rolf Dreiseider, head of institutional clients for Germany at Man Investments, and Bastian Schmedding, a partner at SIG Germany, as vice presidents.

Philippe Marchessaux, head of the asset management firm at BNP Paribas, does not deny that some adjustments are necessary at BNP Paribas IP, due to some activities having become less profitable than others. But, despite the rumours, there is no question of selling a profession that the group Marchessaux belongs to considers a core and strategic activity. The firm has set an ambitious roadmap which will now lead it to target institutional clients. As Marchessaux has detailed for Newsmanagers, the firm has strengths to crow about.

Rajat K. Gupta, 63, former head of McKinsey (from 1994 to 2003) and former director at Goldman Sachs, was this weekend found guilty of insider trading by a jry of his peers, Les Echos reports. After ten hours of deliberation, Gupta was found guilty of four charges of fraud and conspiracy, for transmitting to Raj Rajaratnam, head of Galleon, inside information about Goldman Sachs, particularly plans for Berkshire Hathaway, the company of Warren Buffett, to invest in the US bank in 2007. He faces up to 25 years in prison. Gupta remains free on bail until his sentencing on 18 October.

Inflows to long-term mutual funds (excluding money market funds) totalled USD14.1bn in the month of May, compared with USD24.1bn in April, according to statistics from Morningstar. Since the beginning of the year, inflows to mutual funds have totalled USD147.94bn. Bond mutual funds have taken on a net total of USD7.7bn, compared with USD16.9bn in April, and nearly USD25bn in March. Average demand for mid and high yield has fallen sharply, Morningstar reports. In five months, bond mutual funds show inflows of USD106.46bn. Mutual funds dedicated to US equities finished the month of May with outflows of USD4.7bn, compared with USD9.3bn in April, bringing redemptions since the beginning of the year to USD34.07bn. International equity funds attracted a net total of USD3.5bn in May, compared with USD5.03bn in April, and show inflows of over USD20bn. Money market funds finished the month of May with very modest inflows of USD1.4bn. Since the beginning of the year, outflows total USD129.53bn.

In May, the strongest net subscriptions among mutual fund management firms went to Vanguard (USD8.07bn), followed by JPMorgan (USD2.6bn) and MFS (USD2.53bn).In the first five months of the year, Vanguard has seen net inflows of USD52.39bn, followed by Pimco (USD17.48bn) and JPMorgan (USD13.21bn). T. Rowe Price and DoubleLine are in fourth and fifth place, with USD10.76bn and USD10.5bn, respectively, in net inflows in January-May.

According to a study by Standard & Poor’s Fund Research dedicated to actively-managed US equity funds, only 5% of products manage to stay in the top 50% of funds by performance for five consecutive years, even though by an even distribution of probabilities, 6.25% should have been able to achieve that, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. For funds in the top quartile, the percentage is limited to 15%, though it should be 25%.However, funds which rank in the bottom quartile are must more often liquidated or merged than probability would predict.

According to a study by Standard & Poor’s Fund Research dedicated to actively-managed US equity funds, only 5% of products manage to stay in the top 50% of funds by performance for five consecutive years, even though by an even distribution of probabilities, 6.25% should have been able to achieve that, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. For funds in the top quartile, the percentage is limited to 15%, though it should be 25%. However, funds which rank in the bottom quartile are must more often liquidated or merged than probability would predict.

In addition to Daniel Tubbs, co-head of global emerging markets at BlackRock and a specialist in Asian equities, the Swiss firm Mirabaud Asset Management has recruited three people including a co-manager focused on Asia, two analyst-managers, one covering Latin America and the other the Europe/Middle East/Africa region. The first three members of the team join this Monday, 18 June, and the fourth will arrive in London in mid-July. With its emerging markets team barely in place, Mirabaud is launching a Luxembourg-registered, UCITS IV-compliant fund on 2 July, with the US dollar as its base currency. It is a global emerging markets product, for which the asset management firm is providing seed capital of USD50m. Tubbs will also be responsible for an Asian emerging markets fund with USD200m, repatriated from Lloyd George Asset Management, to whom it had been outsourced.The new product, which will charge 1.50% for retail and 0.75% for institutional shares, will use the MSCI Emerging Markets Total Return index as its benchmark. The conviction-based portfolio will inluce 40 to 70 holdings with a turnover rate of about 100%, and Tubbs insists that he reserves the right to invest in the 21 countries of the index, and in companies which are not included in the index. “This will be unconstrained management, and we may invest in frontier markets. We will spend a large portion of due diligence on governance at quality companies with liquid equities. And we have the budgets we need to visit businesses and their management, and not to be confined to our London offices,” the manager explains. The capacity limit for this type of fund is USD2-3bn. However, a breakdown of the concept into regional and thematic funds is not to be ruled out, “without missing the opportunities offered by midcaps.”

As of the end of 2011, assets in the Chinese national social security fund (NCSSF) totalled CNY868.82bn, which represents an increase of 1.42% in one year, the lowest amount since 2008. This slowdown in the growth of assets is due to a 24% decline in the contribution from the Chinese government, to CNY48.28bn, a decline in performance to 0.84%, and an increase in costs.Government contributions, for their part, fell 85%, possibly due to a decline on the local equity markets and a fall in the number of IPOs.Z-Ben Advisors states that NCSSF still remains by far the largest lender of last resort for the Chinese pension system.

La production industrielle des Etats-Unis a reculé de 0,1% en mai, après avoir progressé de 1,0% (révisé de +1,1%) en avril, en raison principalement d’un repli dans le secteur automobile, a annoncé vendredi la Réserve fédérale de New York. La production manufacturière, elle, ressort en baisse de 0,4%, son deuxième recul en trois mois.

Le moral des ménages américains est tombé début juin à son plus bas niveau depuis six mois sur fond de dégradation du marché du travail aux Etats-Unis et d’escalade de la crise de la dette en Europe, montrent les premiers résultats de l’enquête mensuelle Reuters-Université du Michigan. L’indice du sentiment des consommateurs est revenu en première estimation à 74,1 contre 79,3 en mai. Ce dernier chiffre marquait son plus haut niveau depuis octobre 2007.

La croissance de l’activité manufacturière dans l’Etat de New York a ralenti bien plus qu’attendu en juin, a annoncé la Réserve fédérale de New York. L’indice dit «Empire State» a chuté de près de 15 points à 2,29 contre 17,09 en mai, au plus bas depuis novembre 2011.

Un comité de place a émis vendredi, dans le cadre d’un rapport soumis à consultation publique jusqu’au 6 juillet 2012, vingt-cinq recommandations dans le cadre de la transposition de la directive d’ici juillet 2013. Ces recommandations s’articulent autour de plusieurs grands axes, tels que la promotion de la place de Paris à l’international et la rationalisation de la gamme des fonds français en vue de la rendre plus lisible

L’excédent commercial est ressorti à 5,2 milliards d’euros en avril, contre un déficit de 4,5 milliards il y a un an et une prévision moyenne des économistes de 3,0 milliards. Les exportations ont augmenté de 6% en avril, à 147,6 milliards d’euros tandis que les importations ont reculé de 1% à 142,4 milliards.

L’Agence France Trésor annonce l’adjudication, le lundi 18 juin, d’un montant global compris entre 7 et 8,7 milliards d’euros de BTF. Cette opération portera sur 600 millions à 1 milliard d’euros de bons à 5 semaines qui arriveront à échéance le 26 juillet, sur 4 à 4,5 milliards d’euros de bons à 12 semaines à échéance du 13 septembre, sur 1,3 à 1,7 milliard d’euros de bons à 23 semaines à échéance du 29 novembre et sur 1,1 à 1,5 milliard d’euros de bons à 49 semaines à échéance du 30 mai 2013. L’AFT annonce aussi l’adjudication, le jeudi 21 juin, d’un montant compris entre 7 et 8,5 milliards d’euros de BTAN. Elle adjugera le même jour de 1 à 1,5 milliard d’euros d’OATi.

La zone euro est en proie à des risques sérieux et les responsables politiques doivent agir rapidement, a déclaré le président de la BCE, Mario Draghi, ajoutant que, de son côté, l’institution monétaire se tenait prête à soutenir les banques. Les pays de la zone euro doivent abandonner une partie de leur souveraineté pour que la monnaie unique survive, estime quant à lui, Peter Praet, membre du directoire de la BCE. De son côté Angela Merckel a déclaré que «L’Europe doit discuter des différences croissantes entre les économies française et allemande».

Le déficit commercial britannique s’est creusé de façon inattendue en avril alors que les exportations vers les pays hors de l’Union européenne (UE) ont chuté et que les importations ont fléchi, ont montré vendredi des chiffres officiels. Le Bureau national des statistiques a indiqué que le déficit commercial s'était creusé à 10,103 milliards de livres (12,4 milliards d’euros), soit le deuxième solde négatif le plus important depuis que cette statistique a été créée en janvier 1998.

L’endettement de l’Espagne représentait 72,1% du produit intérieur brut (PIB) du pays à la fin du premier trimestre 2012 contre un ratio de 68,5% en 2011, annonce vendredi la Banque d’Espagne. L’endettement total des 17 régions autonomes du pays s'établissait à 145,1 milliards d’euros à fin mars 2012, soit 13,5% du PIB, contre 140,1 milliards à fin 2011.