News Round Up: May 21

Fisher Funds to lose international managers? Where do financial planners sit on the trust scale? New index for the future.

Monday, May 21st 2012, 7:08AM

Fisher Funds is reportedly about to lose its two international investment managers.

Reports are circulating Ken Applegate and his US-based offside Scott Brown are leaving the firm.

Fisher Funds is unusual in that it is one of a handful of New Zealand managers who runs this investment class in house.

Attempts to confirm the report of Applegate's departure have, so far, been unfruitful.

Financial planners more honest than car salesmen, less honest than doctors

Just 26% of Australians believe financial planners have high standards of ethics and honesty, according to a Roy Morgan survey.

The survey ranked 30 occupations based on perceptions of their professional standards with financial planners ranked 17th.

Nurses, pharmacists and doctors topped the poll, with real estate agents, advertising professionals and car sales people deemed to have the least professional standards.

New index for the future

The NZX has launched a new equity index which will be used as the basis of index futures.

A new index was created as it was considered feasible to have a futures index with 50 constituents was too big. In order to effectively hedge the futures contract, it would require substantial costs to monitor and trade 50 companies.

A smaller index (10 or 15) was not seen as an effective hedging tool.

Back testing showed that the NZX 20 Index had a high correlation with the NZX 50 Index.

As the NZX 20 Index has been designed for index futures it has a higher liquidity requirement compared with other NZX equity indices. The higher liquidity requirement was put in place to ensure that those that hold positions in NZX 20 constituents are able to more easily enter and exit positions of NZX 20 constituents without moving the market.
The only index series published for the NZX 20 Index, is the capital index series.

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