[Weekly Wrap] Is this a turning point in the markets?

This week may have been a short one work-wise, but it's one with an interesting theme. A comment I hear from many advisers is that there has been a dearth of new funds on the market. Indeed most of the new stuff has been a bond of some sort.

Friday, April 17th 2009, 4:30PM

Well this week Good Returns reports on two new offerings coming to the market. One is from a new player, Pathfinder, and the other is from our serial issuer Liontamer.

Both funds, or more correctly one is a proposed fund, have useful twists. The Pathfinder one is a commodities play while our capital protection specialist, Liontamer is planning a "fully unprotected" unit in its proposed Australia fund offer.

The other recent fund is the Fisher Morrison Infrastructure Fund which is featured in this month's Special Report.

Besides these three funds we hear talk that there are other offerings on the drawing board. To me that is good news and will hopefully encourage, or at least awaken, investor sentiment.

The other noticeable trend of the week is that we had a number of surveys looking at what people are thinking. In this list are a survey of finance and accounting professionals with regards to KiwiSaver, ING's quarterly "Dashboard" survey, one from Russell Investments and AMP's SuperWatch.

Each one has its own little theme: AMP and Robert Half focus on KiwiSaver and the news there is encouraging; namely people are intending to stay in the scheme and continue with their current contribution levels.

ING takes a bigger picture and suggests the outlook in New Zealand is more gloomy than other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, while Russell Investments had some thoughts from New Zealand managers on particular asset classes.

All the managers it surveyed said New Zealand equities were undervalued, but not significantly. Most saw opportunities in better quality stocks, if held for the long term. However, the response to bonds was mixed.

Cash over the next 12 months was not favoured either by the managers and property was also still unpalatable to most.

Putting all these things together one wonders whether we are at a turning point in the market with investor sentiment looking positive (or more positive than before) and new opportunities coming to market.

In our People news we report that Ian Smedley has left Guardian Trust after many years with the firm. If you are an adviser working in Southland or wanting to relocate to that part of the country check out this ad: Wealth Protection Consultant wanted.

Recently Tower had released an updated version of its insurance software to help advisers deal with the changing regulatory environment. We have more on that in the Insurance News section along with our latest Practice Management piece.

Have a great weekend.
Philip

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