International funds

The Principal Financial Group has entered into a definitive agreement to buy a 60 percent stake in Claritas Investments, Ltd., a Sao Paulo-based mutual fund and asset management company with more than $1.8 billion in assets under management.

State Street Global Advisors has launched two equity exchange-traded funds designed to track MSCI Global Equity Indices, with one focusing on emerging markets and the other widely covering both developed and developing countries.

Institutional investors continued the pattern established late in 2011 of reducing allocations to equities, according to results of the State Street Investor Confidence Index for February 2012.

The chief economist of The Dreyfus Corporation said Wednesday that world growth will slow down again in 2012, based on International Monetary Fund calculation methods.

The performance benchmark for stocks in developing countries, the MSCI Emerging Market Index, has grown at almost 21% annually over the past three years.

The head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations called Thursday for an end to private letter rulings from the Internal Revenue Service which have “essentially opened the floodgates” for mutual funds to speculate in commodities, from off-share tax havens.

You’ve heard of structured products. These largely were (and are) complex securities based on lots of streams of cash in underlying loans whose flows were not well predicted. There was a credit crisis associated with them in 2008.

The main drivers of markets in 2012 are likely to be similar to last year’s themes —uncertainty over the fate of the Euro, and the related question of whether or not there will be a global recession, said Alan Brown, group chief investment officer at Schroders.

"Emerging markets are just a niche asset class" persistently remains as one of the five biggest myths about investing in emerging markets, said John Flint, chief executive officer of HSBC Global Asset Management.

HSBC Jintrust Fund Management has launched an on-shore RMB money market fund in China, raising RMB1.16 billion, or US$178 million, in its initial public offering, ended Oct. 28.

Van Eck Global has launched the Market Vectors Renminbi Bond ETF, a exchange-traded fund that offers exposure to Chinese renminbi-denominated bonds through the Market Vectors Renminbi Bond Index.

According to Strategic Insight’s latest report, “Emerging Market Bridges: All Eyes on Asia and Latin America for Fund Managers and Private Banks,” local developed markets will continue to struggle for the foreseeable future, and investment professionals should look to the growth centers of Asia and Latin America to drive performance.

Precidian Investments, formerly known as Next Investments, has launched the Maxis Nikkei 225 Index Fund, an exchange-traded fund that Precidian says is the first U.S-listed ETF based on the Nikkei.

Franklin Templeton Investments has launched the Templeton Frontier Markets Fund in Canada, which will invest at least 80% of its portfolio in 61 countries in the very early stages of development, such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Romania, Jordan, Tunisia, Columbia, Zambia, Paraguay and Kenya. International investing expert Mark Mobius will run the fund.

SunAmerica Asset Management has launched the SunAmerica Global Trends Fund, a fund sub-advised by Wellington Management and that combines 10 global asset classes with a rules-based asset allocation strategy that seeks to move in and out of changing markets. The fund will invest primarily in futures contracts and also use technical analysis. It will have between 0% and 10% exposure to each of the global asset classes.

Emerging Global has launched a suite of 11 emerging markets exchange-traded funds under the brand of GEMS (Global Emerging Market Sector) Funds. Three of the funds are rebranded and eight are brand new.

The 225 S&P 500 companies that share full reporting information received 46.3% of their sales outside of the U.S. in 2010, down slightly from the 46.6% they received in 2009 and quite a bit less than the 47.9% that foreign sales comprised of their total revenues in 2008, S&P Indices said.

Guinness Atkinson Asset Management has launched the Renminbi Yuan & Bond Fund, which it says is the first traditional open-end mutual fund to invest directly in bonds denominated in the Chinese currency, Renminbi.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management has just launched the Goldman Sachs India Equity Fund and recently debuted the Goldman Sachs Korea Equity Fund. The portfolios seek long-term capital appreciation by investing in local Indian and Korean equities.

Vanguard is preparing to offer a suite of exchange-traded funds in Canada, and the move is likely to set off a price war in a nation where fees have historically been high, according to reports.