Analysis

The Future Fund made changes affecting more than $60 billion of assets last year as it repositioned for its much vaunted new investment order, but other large investors are taking a different tack.

Markets are looking rosy as the end of the year approaches, but the two extremes aren’t being priced in. Meanwhile, the enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence risks obfuscating who could really win and lose from the boom.

By some measures market breadth has fallen to its lowest levels in more than 20 years as the “Magnificent Seven” reign supreme. Investors should position for a broadening out of equity market leadership.

A panel of experts has pointed to energy, illiquid assets and retirement income as three areas where super funds need to lift their game, with stakeholders expecting the “huge amount of capital” now in the system to contribute to Australian society.

Big institutions live and die by their data, but State Street finds that very few have a strategy for acquiring and managing it while many are lagging in their technology investment.

The outgoing chair of Australia’s sovereign wealth fund has come out swinging against “self-styled experts” with “foolhardy schemes” to spend the $200 billion it manages, warning that winding up the Future Fund will leave the government – and future generations of Australians – worse off.

For the last decade, equities (repackaged and otherwise) have reigned supreme. But in a market where everything might soon start to break, investors have to be more nimble.

The “well-intentioned and genuine” claims super funds made about their sustainable bona fides have landed them in the regulators’ crosshairs. They’re going to have to figure out how to actually follow through on them if they want to win the battle for members’ retirement savings.

Value investing is a lonely road, especially for those practitioners who are looking for real deep value rather than small arbitrages. The stocks they buy are very unloved, and they can stay that way for some time, while everyone else in the market thinks they are nuts.

The NZ Superannuation Fund (NZS) now manages about 30 per cent of its assets internally, with some of them in the capable hands of a new artificially intelligent portfolio manager dubbed “Keorangi”.

Biodiversity loss could threaten more than 50 per cent of global gross domestic product, but the amounts spent on reversing it pale in comparison to investment in clean energy.

Markets could be asked to absorb a lot more debt as central banks lighten their balance sheets. But as governments continue to issue it, nobody knows whether unwinding can be done in an orderly manner.