Weekly Wrap: PackING it in

The big news story of the week is undoubtedly the closure of ING's credit funds. This is something that will galvanise attention on this part of the market, and possibly distract people from the finance company sector.

Friday, March 14th 2008, 3:30PM

For some time now it has been clear there are problems in this space, what's more there are a good handful of players with products which combined have many hundreds of millions of dollars invested in them.

Another big piece of news – which Good Returns broke – was the NZ Super Fund making its chief investment office Paul Dyer redundant. This is major, as here you have a guy responsible for more than $13 billion of our money being shown the door. We would like to know more about what is happening at the fund and whether it is changing its investment strategy.

Till now we have always said the fund is a great example of how to invest for the long term.

Attention shifts to credit funds
As I mentioned in today's Weekly Wrap the indefinite closure of ING's credit funds is likely to galvanise attention onto this sector of the market and away from finance companies (unless we have another big one fall over). [more]

Sticking with people news, the previous Blog on changes at Fisher Funds has attracted a huge amount of response. Have a read here.

This week we reported that Fisher Funds has a new analyst. Also in People this week we have one of New Zealand's top young planners moving to a new firm and the former head of Mercer chairing an emerging advisory business.

One of the fascinating stories recently, revolves around the developing competition between various adviser bodies for members and APB status. David Chaplin has an excellent story on Good Returns this week outlining what the Institute of Chartered Accountants is thinking. It's well worth a read as it puts the story into context, which is something no-one else has done.

There's also competition going on in another area of the market, with the Professional Advisers Association offering NZMBA members an alternative.

In our Insurance News section we have the latest Cover Notes, which updates you on happenings around that part of the market.

KiwiSaver is going to have a much higher prominence in the next month or so, and there will no doubt be a jump in enrollments when the compulsory employer contributions kick in on April 1. An IRD-authored report on the first six months of KiwiSaver was released yesterday. We report on that today and one of the interesting things is the number of people who are selecting their own managers.