News Mentions & Press Releases
nvestors fled the biggest government bond exchange-traded fund at the fastest pace ever during the recent sovereign-debt selloff.
The $4.3 billion iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF saw investors withdraw $1.7 billion of cash in the six weeks ended June 5. That was nearly 30 percent of its market capitalization, and the worst six-week string of outflows since its 2002 inception. The exodus left it with a net $1.8 billion of outflows so far this year, the most of any bond fund, according to Bloomberg data.
“It’s going along with the overall Treasury market,” said Aaron Kehoe, managing director of fixed-income operations for Cantor Fitzgerald LP’s ETF business in New York. “You’ve had a decent selloff in the past few weeks.”….
Independence and a desire for self-sufficiency drove pioneers westward in the 1800s. Those same qualities often drive entrepreneurs to build successful companies.
Few feel this more than the Clarke brothers of Omaha. Descendants of Mormon pioneers, brothers Todd and Eric today lead NorthStar Financial Services, a firm co-founded by their father W. Patrick Clarke and grown over the years into a major player in the independent advisory space.
Consider the breadth of NorthStar: It’s a constellation of companies, many originally built to meet a need either of their own or for their clients, and then spun out into self-contained businesses on their own…..
NorthStar Financial Services, as it’s known today, grew out of Patrick Clarke’s vision to build a small financial planning firm in Omaha, Neb. in 1975.
For many years, NorthStar seemed to go under the radar, while the industry paid close attention to prominent players in the RIA space like Envestnet and HighTower.
But the emerging force out of Omaha now has assets approaching $300 billion and 700 employees, and consists of seven standalone companies aimed at helping investment advisors run better businesses.
And just earlier this year, NorthStar announced its acquisition by private equity firm TA Associates, which promises to give the firm an infusion of capital for acquisitions of its own. The rest of the industry is taking notice.
Follow the firm’s storied journey through history below…
For the first time that I can remember, my international allocation is overweight Japan. Japanese companies have remained globally competitive for customers, but not investors. Corporate efficiency has lagged and shareholders have suffered. Prime Minster Shinzo Abe’s reforms provide the needed push to make Japan a better place to invest.
The top ETF for Japan is the broadly diversified iShares MSCI Japan ETF (EWJ |B-99). While the vast majority of Japan ETFs are potential substitutes, the reforms driving potential appreciation are likely to be felt most in large-cap companies. A diversified, cap-weighted index provides consistent exposure to the Japanese stock market.
Investment Thesis
The bad side of Japan is well-known. Here’s the list:
- The population is shrinking
- The government debt problem is out of control
- The society is too rigid to make changes
- Abe has given up on structural change
- Japanese companies are inefficient
However, the bad side of the Japan narrative represents an account assumed to be true simply because it matches our expectations…
Patrick Clarke founded a small financial planning firm in the 1970s; since then, the firm has grown into a constellation of companies under the NorthStar Financial Services umbrella, with some 700 employees overseeing nearly $300 billion in assets, either under management or administration.
Patrick’s three sons, who run different divisions of the company, have promised the spirit of their father’s intentions remains intact. Today, Todd runs CLS Investments, an ETF strategist that manages $6.5 billion for over 2,000 advisors; Eric runs Orion Advisor Services, a home-grown portfolio accounting and performance platform now used by over 600 firms and overseeing $209 billion in assets under administration; and Brett runs Blu Giant, a creative services firm that produces branding, social media, video, print and websites for advisors.
This month, we profiled the Clarke clan and how the family built the business over the years. Here are seven things you may not know about the Clarke brothers and NorthStar…
The wild ride for Chinese stocks continue, but the stakes have clearly been upped in recent weeks, according to a new chart from Bank of America Merrill Lynch that shows the biggest flows going into the country since the global financial crisis.
In a note entitled, “China in a Bull Shop,” chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett reported Friday that the latest data show equity funds dedicated to the country received $4.5 billion in inflows in the week. That marks the biggest weekly inflow since April 2008…
The investing world is going to recognize China whether it wants to or not. It’s all full steam ahead if on June 9, the benchmarkers at MSCI include mainland China equities in the hotly traded and highly benchmarked MSCI Emerging Markets Index.
“It’s going to be huge,” says Grant Engelbart, portfolio manager at the $6.5 billion CLS Investments asset management firm in Omaha. “I think the odds are low that it won’t be included, though the initial percentage of companies will be low because of the existing quota system for foreigners. You can’t have a ridiculous amount of assets tracking an equity you can’t even buy. It’ll take time and it is going to be a very big deal,” Engelbart says….
The world wanted China to go capitalist, did it not? Well, welcome to capitalism, people. When a country as powerful and as large as China is allowing for its investor class to ship money out of country, and is allowing foreigners to ship money into its stock market for the first time ever, this is what is going to happen. Asset prices are going to go crazy for a little while.
A handful of companies have taken a hit recently, becoming unwilling examples of the China Bubble — as if China is the only country to ever have a bubble. Better yet, in the West, the narrative is that China is just not allowed to have a bubble. It can open its market, but asset prices can never inflate….
Everyone loves the apocalypse. The Chinese apocalypse — aka the “hard landing” — has been going on now for, what, a decade? Latest on the list of China haters is the debt bomb. This is going to kill us all so run for your lives.
And then turn off CNBC and Fox Business News and pay attention to Matthews Asia and fund managers who actually have real money at stake. For them, they have to understand what is going on in the Chinese securities market. It’s not a dog and pony show. This is reality, which is a lot different from perceived reality. In fact, China’s debt bomb is more like a bottle rocket…
May 21 U.S. investors who fled emerging market equities at the beginning of the year are coming back with a vengeance.
So far in the second quarter, they have poured $5.3 billion into related exchange-traded funds, citing growth prospects and attractive valuations for a group they had been selling broadly since September. That is more than double the total net investments in emerging market equity ETFs for all of 2014, according to FactSet data.
In the first quarter, investors pulled $1 billion out of the group….
As U.S. stocks hit new highs, shares of companies in emerging markets look cheaper than U.S. stocks, said Heidi Richardson, BlackRock’s global investment strategist.
“Valuations are looking much more attractive,” Richardson said, noting the discount on price-to-earnings for emerging markets relative to the U.S. and developed markets.
The SPDR S&P 500 ETF, for example, has a current price-to-earnings ratio of 20.28, while the Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF and iShares Emerging Markets ETF have price-to-earnings ratios of 13.02 and 13.05, respectively.