UPDATE 1-Aberdeen lures net 3.5 bln stg as investors favour equities

Mon Mar 25, 2013 3:32am EDT

* Net inflows 3.5 bln stg

* AuM 212.3 nln stg at Feb 28

* Net inflow into equities funds 4.27 bln stg

* Demand for global emerging markets strong

By Tommy Wilkes

LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) – Aberdeen Asset Management pulled in 3.5 billion pounds ($ 5.3 billion) of net new money in the first two months of the year, as clients rushed to gain access to rallying stock markets.

In a trading statement on Monday, FTSE 100-listed Aberdeen said its assets under management rose to 212.3 billion pounds at Feb. 28 from 193.4 billion two months earlier.

While a rise in global stock market valuations pushed its assets higher, the firm also added money into its equities range of funds.

Net inflows of 3.5 billion pounds compare with 1.4 billion for the same period last year.

British fund managers have enjoyed a strong start to the year as investors regain their appetite for equities.

Aberdeen said demand for its global emerging market (GEM) products was again strong and said it would continue to try and restrict new money flowing into the funds because of limits on liquidity in the markets where it operates.

In February the company said it would introduce a 2 percent initial charge on new money into its Luxembourg and UK-domiciled pooled GEM funds.

Aberdeen said it also saw strong inflows into Asian equities including Japanese and Chinese funds.

The net inflows into equities funds of 4.27 billion pounds more than offset net outflows from its fixed income, money market and property businesses, which tend to charge lower fees.

Aberdeen said the net inflows would add 35 million pounds of annualised fee income.

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Reuters: Financial Services and Real Estate

UPDATE 1-Aberdeen lures net 3.5 bln stg as investors favour equities

Credit Suisse reverses cautious stand on equities

The logo of Swiss bank Credit Suisse is seen on a building at Paradeplatz square in Zurich, February 13, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Michael Buholzer

NEW YORK | Tue Mar 12, 2013 1:22pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A month after turning cautious on global stock investing, the investment committee of Credit Suisse Group’s (CSGN.VX) U.S. private bank has reversed course.

“Plentiful liquidity, attractive valuations and low inflation make equities among our best options in an asset allocation context,” a team led by Barbara Reinhard, the unit’s chief investment strategist, wrote in a note to clients.

The strategists were alarmed in early February about political stalemates in Spain and Italy, the sequestration congressional crisis in the U.S., bailout talks in Cyprus and a seemingly overenthusiastic rush into equity mutual funds. The trends led them to put a tactical alert on stock investing over the next one to six months.

Last week, however, they decided that issues in Europe were country-specific rather than systemic, that central banks in the U.S. and Europe will continue their stimulative monetary policies and that investor optimism in the U.S. has cooled enough to guard against hyped-up stock prices that will quickly fall, according to the report.

Though the S&P 500 index is quickly approaching the all-time high it set in October 2007, investors should take the plunge by reentering the stock market in phases, the strategist wrote.

Caution about investing in stocks after two long bear markets in the past 10 years is understandable and “poignant,” they wrote, given that investors are sitting on “high cash holdings in spite of several years of decent equity market returns.”

The Credit Suisse strategists recommend a phase-in strategy for getting back into the stock market. Rather than plunging in with all their cash, investors should use one of three strategies: investing 25 percent in stock every three months for the next year; investing one-third in stock every six months; or investing 50 percent initially followed by the remainder in two 25 percent allocations over the following six months.

“While we know that, objectively, investing all-at-once produces the best return over the long run, a phase-in strategy can help investors who are entering equities neutralize some of the emotion that may arise in the event of an interim pull-back,” the private banking strategists wrote.

Analyzing 12-month returns on the S&P 500 index since 1926, the strategists found that the all-at-once strategy yielded a return of 11.0 percent compared to 7.4 percent to 9.7 percent for the various phase-in strategies.

Credit Suisse’s private banking group in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, which includes about 600 relationship managers selling investments and financial planning services to wealthy individuals, reorganized last week.

Philip Vasan, who ran the bank’s fast-growing prime brokerage business for hedge funds, is replacing Anthony DeChellis as head of the group.

Vasan will assume his new post in April and will report to Rob Shafir, global cohead of private banking and wealth management at the Swiss bank.

(Reporting by Jed Horowitz; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Andrew Hay)

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Reuters: Business News

Credit Suisse reverses cautious stand on equities

"US Equities: What Is There To Say?"

In 213 words (surprisingly this time not in the form of just one sentence from the Joyceian stream-of-Austrian-consciouness) Diapason’s Sean Corrigan does a better summation of “the market” than can be found in any expansive weekend Op-Ed or 100-click slideshow “explaining” all that has happened, and claiming to tell you “all you need to know.”

From Sean Corrigan, CIO of Diapason Commodities

US equities, what is there to say?

Successive new highs; record buybacks (Miller?Modigliani and ESOP rules, OK!); multi?year heaviest mutual fund buying; vol a whisker off its Crisis Era lows; margin debt rising as fast as in 2000 and 2007; put?call ratios depressed; cumulative A/D in the stratosphere; junk bonds near yield lows; leveraged loan prices back at Blue Sky, mid?2007 levels—and now the jobs numbers giving everyone an all over warm glow.

The only thing to argue against this is that it’s simply all too good to be true; it’s a function of the crazed, macroeconomic theorizing of a sixty year?old, wannabe?Oz sitting in an office on 20th St. and Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., who almost got on the congressional record exhorting his interlocutor to quite belly?aching about the income on his aged mother’s savings and to get her into stocks instead.

For all we can surmise that this is just another in a long series of bubbles, each inflated to ward off the reckoning due from the collapse of its lengthening family tree of predecessors, this all-encompassing experiment not just with our livelihoods but with the wider structure of our very society shows no signs of being called of but, if anything, intensified in scale and extended in geography.

Zero Hedge

"US Equities: What Is There To Say?"