Selon L’Agefi suisse, qui cite l’agence AWP, le CEO d’UBS, Oswald Grübel, a perçu pour le deuxième trimestre écoulé des signes encourageants. «Sur le plan opérationnel, la marche des affaires a progressé par rapport au trimestre précédent. Les pertes et amortissements sur les positions à risques ont pu être réduites et nous avons aussi simultanément diminué à niveau l’ampleur des actifs à risques», écrit Oswald Grübel dans un mémo adressé à son personnel, et mis à disposition de l’agence AWP. La banque déplore malheureusement de nouvelles sorties de capitaux.

Le capital-investisseur Zurmont Madison Private Equity LP a acquis la majorité du bureau de traduction CLS Communication à la faveur d’une forte augmentation de capital et d’un buy-out partiel des actionnaires initiaux. Le management conservera une importante minorité de blocage ainsi que la direction opérationnelle de l’entreprise. Le conseil de surveillance accueillera des administrateurs représentant le zurichois Zurmont Madison Management.

Pioneer (groupe UniCredit) a ouvert depuis fin juin et jusqu’au 17 juillet la souscription du compartiment US Credit Recovery 2014 de sa Sicav luxembourgeoise Pioneer Funds. Il s’agit comme son nom l’indice d’un fonds d’obligations d’entreprises américaines à échéance 2014, avec un profil de risque moyen. Il est disponible en deux classes de parts avec un régime de frais différent mais toutes deux avec une couverture du risque de change. CaractéristiquesNom du compartiment : US Credit Recovery 2014Code Isin : NCCommissions de souscription : 2 %Droits de sortie : 2 % (dégressives jusqu'à 1 %)Frais de gestion : Fixe: 1,1 %Variables : 10 % sur la surperformance par rapport au rendement du US Treasury N/B 4.2% 15/08/14 majorés de 100 points de baseMontant de la part : NCMontant minimum à la souscription : NC

La France a été le dernier grand pays européen où BNY Mellon Asset Management se soit implanté physiquement. La succursale parisienne de la filiale britannique a désormais un semestre d'existence, l'occasion pour Newsmanagers d'interroger son directeur général sur ses objectifs.

Selon l'étude annuelle de Magstat, l’encours total des banques privées en Italie s’est contracté de 12 % à 504 milliards d’euros, dont 60 % gérés par 59 banques commerciales locales et 8,6 % par des banques privées indépendantes, également locales, rapporte Reuters. Les trois grands acteurs du secteur, Intesa Sanpaolo, UniCredit et UBI Banca, affichent ensemble une part de marché de 40,4 %, soit 203 milliards d’euros.

Selon L’Agefi suisse, la société de portefeuille suédoise Investor est repassée dans le vert au deuxième trimestre, avec un résultat net de 16,85 milliards de couronnes, soit 1,53 milliard d’euros, après une perte de 3,52 milliards pour la même période de 2008. De janvier à juin 2009, la valeur des actifs s’élève à 125,687 milliards de couronnes, contre 138,798 milliards (chiffre révisé) sur la même période un an plus tôt.

Selon l’association Fondsbolagens Forening, les fonds suédois ont enregistré en juin des souscriptions nettes pour le septième mois consécutif. Elles ont été de 12,7 milliards de couronnes, ce qui porte le total pour le premier semestre à 40,1 milliards de couronnes.Tous les grands segments ont affiché des rentrées nettes le mois dernier. Les plus fortes vont aux fonds d’actions (5,8 milliards de couronnes). De leur coté, les fonds obligataires ont drainé 4,6 milliards, les fonds diversifiés, 1,1 milliard, les fonds monétaires 0,7 milliard et les divers - essentiellement des hedge funds - ont collecté 0,6 milliard. A l’exception des fonds monétaires, qui accusent des sorties nettes de 14,5 milliards de couronnes, toutes les catégories enregistrent des souscriptions nettes pour le premier semestre : 42,5 milliards de couronnes pour les fonds d’actions, 7,3 milliards pour les diversifiés, 4,3 milliards pour les obligataires et 0,6 milliards pour les divers.

Les fonds souverains pourraient délaisser les titres du Trésor américain pour donner la préférence aux actions et à la gestion alternative. C’est en tout cas l’opinion de 56% des 146 gérants qui travaillent régulièrement avec les souverains et qui estiment que leur allocation actions devrait prendre du poids au cours des cinq prochaines années, selon une enquête réalisée le Oxford University Center for Employment, Work and Finance («Analyzing SWFs Through Proxy : The Oxford Survey of SWF Asset Managers») co-sponsorisée par Pensions & Investments.L’immobilier pourrait également occuper une plus grande part de l’allocation des souverains pour 53% des gérants interrogés. Les perspectives sont moins encourageants pour le private equity, 42% de l'échantillon estimant que la poche dédiée au capital investissement pourrait augmenter et 27% affirmant même qu’elle pourrait diminuer au cours des cinq prochaines années. A noter toutefois que selon 72% des répondants, la croissance des fonds souverains a jusqu’ici surtout profité au private equity. Ces classes d’actifs ne seront pas les seules à bénéficier du moindre intérêt des investisseurs souverains dans les titres du Trésor américain. Les fonds souverains accordent de plus en plus de mandats sur des obligations d’entreprises, des MBS ou encore des obligations à haut rendement. Du côté des perdants, l’obligataire et les hedge funds seront les classes d’actifs les plus affectées, selon 43% et 42% respectivement des gérants interrogés. Et les trois quarts de l'échantillon estiment que les fonds souverains devraient réduire leur exposition aux obligations du Trésor US. Selon State Street, l’encours des actifs des fonds souverains pourrait s'établir dans une fourchette comprise entre 4.850 milliards de dollars et 6.930 milliards de dollars d’ici à 2012, en fonction notamment de l'évolution des prix du pétrole. Dans tous les cas de figure, une modification de leur allocation de quelques points pourrait se traduire par des transferts de centaines de milliards de dollars.

Selon Absolute Return, les hedge funds n’ont gagné que 0,4 % en juin, sur la base de 43 % de l'échantillon habituel, et la performance du premier semestre serait ressortie à 6,33 % contre une perte de 12 % en janvier-juin 2008, rapporte Hedge Week. Le meilleur résultat est affiché par la stratégie arbitrage de convertibles, avec une performance de 21 %.

Selon Les Echos, la division «grands risques» d’AGF sera prochainement rattachée à celle de sa maison mère Allianz, AGCS, dédiée aux risques industriels, maritimes, aériens et spatiaux au niveau mondial. Cette filiale, qui affichait 2,9 milliards d’euros de chiffre d’affaires en 2008, se positionne comme «l’un des deux ou trois leaders» mondiaux sur ce marché. En France, les branches d’assurance de grands risques d’AGF (dommages, responsabilité civile, lignes financières, marine, aviation, risques techniques) passeront sous la bannière AGCS en octobre, et seront fusionnées avec les activités marine et aviation France, déjà logées dans la filiale française d’AGCS.

Selon les calculs d’IPE, l’encours des 400 principaux gestionnaires d’actifs mondiaux se situait fin décembre à 26,5 billions d’euros, ce qui représente une chute de 21,8 % en un an. Pour les 120 grands gestionnaires institutionnels européens, la contraction a été dans le même temps de 20,7 % à 4,6 billions d’euros.Vingt-huit des gestionnaires institutionnels européens ont perdu entre 0 et 20 % de leurs actifs sous gestion par rapport à fin 2007, tandis que 36 ont perdu entre 20 et 40 % et que 13 ont perdu plus de 40 %.Seuls 16 d’entre eux ont affiché une hausse de leurs encours, UFG se classant premier, avec un bond en avant de 79,3 % à 5 milliards d’euros, devant Pimco (Allianz), dont l’encours a gonflé à 103,9 milliards d’euros contre 59,5 milliards. DB Advisors (Deutsche Bank) s’est classé second par l’ampleur de l’augmentation, avec un accroissement de 5 milliards d’euros ou de 3,9 %. Deux autres groupes ont enregistré une augmentation de leurs actifs sous gestion supérieure à 2 milliards d’euros : le suisse Vontobel, dont l’encours a conflé de 2,9 milliards d’euros ou de 65 % pour atteindre 10,2 milliards d’euros en fin d’année, et Putnam, dont les encours institutionnels ont augmenté de 35 % ou de 2,6 milliards d’euros à 6,4 milliards.En revanche, BlackRock et Barclays Global Investors (BGI) ont accusé un plongeon de plus de 91milliards d’euros mais ils arrivent ensemble à 363 milliards d’euros gérés pour le compte d’investisseurs institutionnels, derrière toutefois Crédit Agricole Asset Management/SGAM, qui - pris dans leur globalité - se seraient classés en tête avec 439,2 milliards d’euros fin 2008.

L’association FVPK des 19 caisses de retraite autrichiennes (11,5 milliards d’euros d’encours, 560.000 adhérents) a indiqué que, malgré une perte de 1,04 % pour janvier-mars, le premier semestre s’est terminé avec une performance moyenne de 2,7 %, le deuxième trimestre ayant produit un gain de 3,74 %.Sur l’ensemble de 2008, la perte moyenne avait été de 12,94 %, la performance de long terme depuis 1997 se situant à 2 % par an.

On Monday, Premier Asset management took over the management contracts for two OEIC umbrella funds, containing ten Credit Suisse funds, from Aberdeen Unit Trust Managers. Total assets in these funds are GBP850m, which brings assets under management at Premier AM to about GBP2.3bn.At the same time, Premier AM has announced that as a part of its new strategic alliance with PSigma Asset Management, Bill Mott and his team will become investment advisors at Premier for the funds formerly known as CS Alpha Growth, CS Alpha Income, CS Income et CS Monthly Income, the last two of which were managed by Mott at Credit Suisse.The changes will take effect on 31 July; until that time, the funds will continue to be managed by Aberdeen. The other six funds will be managed internally by Premier, but it is likely that two of them, the UK 250 and the Smaller Companies, will later be outsourced to another management firm.Aberdeen will retain five British retail funds from Credit Suisse, which will continue to be managed by Aidan Kearney and Graham Bruce, both of whom formerly worked at Credit Suisse. The Global Income Plus fund, which was managed by Graham Ashby at Credit Suisse, will now be managed by the global equities team at Aberdeen, led by Stephen Doherty, as Ashby has joined LV Asset Management.

db x-trackers (Deutsche Bank) has admitted an ETF to trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) which replicates the S&P US Carbon Efficient index, which includes US large caps with comparatively low emissions of pollutants, and a carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions 50% and 60% lower than average, respectively. The objective will be to achieve performance approaching that of the S&P 500, Global Pensions reports. The index was developed by S&P in collaboration with Deutsche Bank and Trucost. The new ETF is expected to be of particular interest to pension funds.

The Pension Protection Fund (PPF) has announced that it has awarded bond mandates to a further four management firms. Its allocation to bonds is currently 50% of the GBP3bn portfolio, Professional Pensions reports. Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) and Pimco (Allianz) will retain their mandates, while the new arrivals are Mondrian Investment Partners and Rogge Capital Partners. Crédit Agricole Asset Management (CAAM) and Wellington Management International have been retained for bond mandates which will be assigned to them at a later date.

RBS, in which the British government controls a majority stake, is regrouping its investment banking activities in the Asia-Pacific region into a single entity, La Tribune reports.

In an interview with Global Pensions, Jean-Bpatiste de Franssu, the new chairman of EFAMA and CEO of Invesco Europe, claims that problems with the controversial directive on hedge fund managers could have been avoided if EFAMA and other professional associations had declared their opinions earlier and taken a more proactive attitude to regulations, rather than waiting for regulators to establish the new framework. He says that both the range of funds to which the legislation applies (the European Commission bill applies to all non-UCITS funds) and the question of the responsibility of the custodian should be studied further.During his two-year term, de Franssu hopes to establish a level playing field for distribution of funds from asset management firms. He would also like to achieve the creation of a third-pillar retirement system which would allow employees to move freely throughout Europe.

The IASB, an organisation that establishes international accounting standards, on 14 July published a survey and report on the subject of the classification and evaluation of financial instruments. The IASB hopes to end criticisms which have been aimed at it since the outbreak of the financial crisis over the complexity of financial instruments whose partial valuation by fair value standards contributed to the financial turbulence. The IASB does not go so far in its statement, but does indicate that its proposals would significantly reduce the complexity of the treatment of financial instruments and calm the criticisms of investors. The accounting standards body is proposing, for example, to eliminate various methods of writing down the value of assets which are up for sale and assets evaluated at amortised cost. The IASB invites comments from all participants by 14 September, and hopes to finalise the proposals in sufficient time to allow businesses to take the changes into account in their 2009 bookkeeping. The changes also take into account injunctions formulated by the G20 and calls by the French authorities for the IAS 39 standard (applicable to financial instruments) to be revised by the end of the year.

La Tribune reports that the NYSE-Euronext platform dedicated to block trading of shares appears to be attracting growing interest from investors. Fourteen new members have joined the ‘dark pool,’ which allows investors to trade shares discreetly, in compliance with all applicable regulations. Smart Pool, launched this February in partnership with JP Morgan, BNP Parbias and HSBC, has since posted a 90% growth in its activities.Market regulators are not particularly comfortable with these markets, however. According to the Financial Times, cited by La Tribune, the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) is expected to hold a meeting with four dark pool operators today.

Les Echos reports that the US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into credit default swap (CDS) markets. The Justice department is seeking to determine whether several major banks (JPMorganChase, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland and Goldman Sachs), all of which are shareholders in the Market company, may have profited from inside information in this capacity.

The former lawyer Marc Dreier was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison for attempting to sell USD700 million fake promissory notes and defrauding clients, the Wall Street Journal reports. He will also be required to refund USD387.7m. The judge stated that he will support a request on the part of the prosecutor to seize USD746m in assets.

United Kingdom Financial Investments, the public holding company in charge of managing the UK government’s participations, announced on 13 July that the state’s stakes in British banks may take years to be sold off but by bits, La Tribune reports.

The British management industry is still very heavily affected by the financial crisis. Heavy falls on the markets in fourth quarter 2008 will have a marked impact on the entire sector in 2009, the British Investment Management Association (IMA) in its annual report for 2008. Despite mergers and acquisitions realised last year, the British management industry remains fragmented, the IMA reports. In 2008, total assets under management in the United Kingdom at IMA member firms totalled GBP3trn, compared with GBP3.4trn as of the end of 2007. Of this total, GBP1trn (an amount which remains unchanged since the end of 2007) is managed on behalf of international clients, while GBP500bn (down from GBP570bn) are in offshore funds, and GBP362bn (down from GBP468bn) are in funds domiciled in the United Kingdom. The proportion of the equities market held by British management firms was down to 43%, from 44% the previous year. Profits for management firms fell to GBP9.4bn, from GBP10.2bn in 2007.

In a clear allusion to a press statement from Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investment GmbH announcing the results of an audit of the open-ended real estate fund P2 Value, which revealed significant declines in the value of the portfolio (see separate article in today’s edition), Credit Suisse points out that the CS Euroreal fund, which reopened to redemptions on 30 June (see Newsmanagers of 26 June and 10 July) has completely different characteristics in terms of allocation by country, type of real estate assets, and age of properties in the portfolio.The fund management firm on Monday night emphasized that an audit of nearly 90% of assets in the portfolio in the first nine months of the current fiscal year (which will end on 30 September) revealed a need to correct the valuation of the fund slightly upward. Credit Suisse also points out that for 2009 as a whole, its projections of returns of over 4% have been confirmed (as returns have totalled 4.3% for the twelve months to the end of June). Lastly, the successful reopening of the fund to redemptions suggests that a wave of subscriptions may be expected, which would allow for “a targeted anticyclical extension” of the real estate portfolio.

On Monday, Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investment announced that as a safety precaution, it will be freezing subscriptions to the P2 Value real estate fund, which has already been closed to redemptions since the end of October. The measure comes in the wake of the first results of an audit of the portfolio, which suggests that significant devaluations of assets in the portfolio are to be expected.According to professionals, the bad news was foreseeable to the extent that the fund (EUR1.66bn) was launched in November 2005, and the investment phase coincided with a period at which real estate prices were at their peak.The management firm states that gross and net cash positions as of 13 July totalled EUR212.94m and EUR119.64m, or 12.8% and 7.2% of assets.

On Tuesday, db x-trackers (Deutsche Bank) announced that from 20 July, it will be cutting its management commission for the Luxembourg-registered ETF fund db x-trackers DJ Euro Stoxx 50 to 0% from 15% currently. Thorsten Michalik, head of ETF activities, says the product has consistently outperformed its benchmark index by at least 50 basis points in the past three years. As this outperformance appears sustainable considering the tax regime applicable to income and dividends, and the possibilities provided by securities lending, db x-trackers will no longer charge fees for the fund. Db x-trackers will also be offering a fully hedged swap based on the ETF, effective immediately. The ETFs of the range use synthetic replication. As the counterparty for the swap is Deutsche Bank, the investor will bear the counterparty risks related to the swap. This risk is limited to 10% of net asset value (NAV). To reduce this amount, net asset value for most equities, commodities and currencies ETFs will now have their swap structured hedged by securities. The coverage will be equivalent to at least 108% of net asset value.

The management mandates for the two largest hedge funds from Santander to have been affected by the Madoff fraud, Banif Fairfield Impala and Banif Optimal Low Volatility, have been withdrawn from Fairfield and Optimal and assigned to Allfunds Alternative, a joint venture from Allfunds Bank (Santander and Intesa Sanpaolo) and Goldman Sachs, Expansión reports. The Impala fund becomes the Select Global Managers, while the Low Volatility fund becomes known as the Manager Alpha Series. Allfunds Alternative already managed the third hedge fund on sale from Banif (the private bank of the Santander group), the Banif Allfunds Springbuck, which has not been affected by the Madoff scandal, and which has outperformed the two funds affected by the Madoff scandal.

The Lyxor ETF Ibex 35 Inverso will be admitted to trading on the Spanish stock exchange on 16 July, Funds People reports. The product, which complies with UCITS III, replicates the Ibex 35 Inverso index, which is the inverse of the Ibex 35 con dividendos. Management commission is 0.40%.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Michael Huffington, a former Republican congressman from California, has filed a lawsuit against the Carlyle Group in a Massachusetts court, claiming that the private equity investor concealed the risks involved in a mortgage fund, Carlyle Capital Corp, which went bankrupt in spring. Huffington, who had invested USD20m in the product, called “low risk” and “conservative” by the management firm, also names david Rubinstein, the co-founder of Carlyle, who was in charge of fundraising for the product.

The alternative management firm AQR Capital Management [AQR is the abbreviation for Applied Quantitative Research - ed] last week launched the mutual funds AQR Momentum Fund, AQR Small Cap Momentum Fund and AQR International Momentum Fund, which replicate the new momentum indexes AQR Momentum, Small Cap Momentum and International Momentum, the Wall Street Journal reports. The funds allow retail investors access to a strategy which was previously available only to institutional investors. The indexes use the top third of the equities markets, which have outperformed their counterparts in the past twelve months, weighted according to their market cap. Rebalancing of the portfolio occurs on a quarterly basis. Minimal subscription for the funds is set at USD5,000, and TER measures between 0.49% and 0.65%.