Hints and tips:
...Legg Mason accepted the deal terms....
...After making a tidy return on an investment in Legg Mason following its $6.5bn acquisition by Franklin Templeton, Peltz took a bite out of Invesco and Janus Henderson....
...Passive ETFs, which simply track indices such as the S&P 500, dominate the market....
...Job moves Joe Sullivan, the former head of Legg Mason, is joining Allspring Global Investments, the newly rebranded name of Wells Fargo Asset Management, as the chief executive and chair....
...That is exactly what happened to [Neil] Woodford two years ago and [former Legg Mason fund manager] Bill Miller in 2007. “[Miller] beat the S&P for 15 years in a row. Money flowed in....
...Its shares have risen 20.4 per cent this year as the eight-member S&P Asset Management index has dropped 3.4 per cent....
...The S&P 500 reached an all-time high in September but European stock markets have not fully recovered losses sustained earlier this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic....
...James Hirschmann, chief executive of Western, said he was excited to be joining a company that “value[s] our investment independence and organisational autonomy”. Additional reporting by Owen Walker...
...In February Franklin Templeton acquired Legg Mason and last month Morgan Stanley agreed to buy Eaton Vance, two major deals in part aimed at getting the kind of economies of scale enjoyed by BlackRock and...
...Tellingly, the shares of most big investment groups have underperformed the broader stock market this year, falling by an average of 2.4 per cent compared with the S&P 500’s 10 per cent gain....
...S&P Global, the largest rating agency, has downgraded more than 200 companies because of the pandemic, with energy groups such as Occidental particularly hard hit by the drop in demand for oil alongside...
...Franklin Templeton is in the process of buying Legg Mason in a deal that will swell its asset base to $1.5tn....
...Legg Mason’s fabled Bill Miller, beating the S&P for 15 consecutive years from 1991 to 2005 with his Value Trust, was for a long time the standard bearer for active equity management — until his style stopped...
...The asset management industry, which used to trade at healthy valuations, now has a price/earnings multiple half that of the S&P 500. Its diminution is only just beginning....
...Legg Mason shares dropped 39 per cent last year, worse than the 26 per cent drop for fund managers in the S&P 500 index of US companies....
...Legg Mason has felt the brunt of the changes sweeping fund management, as investors pull assets from active portfolios in favour of cheaper funds that track indices, such as the S&P 500....
...The question of how to combine investment businesses successfully has become more pressing, following a spate of recent transactions, from Franklin Templeton’s $6.5bn purchase of Legg Mason to Jupiter Fund...
...That is what history tells us — so on Thursday's at least investors were biting at some large tech titans and bottom fishing among the S&P 500 energy sector....
...S&P 500 futures, which track Wall Street’s benchmark stock barometer, fell ahead of the opening bell in New York....
...there are growing shareholder calls for greater independence at board level, several asset managers combine the chief executive and chairman role, including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, Legg...
...The S&P 500 index of US equities was up 16.4 per cent by the end of July, meaning the equity market has put a powerful tailwind behind many funds....
...ETFs emerged in the early 1990s and have boomed in the past decade as investor appetites have shifted towards low-cost funds that track simple indices, like the S&P 500 basket of US blue-chip stocks....
...The group proposed a dividend of €2.90 a share, up 17 per cent on 2017’s figure....
...As a whole, US-listed asset managers saw 1 per cent trimmed off their stocks this week, even as the S&P 500 climbed back to its early-December level....
...This year, however, the S&P 500 is up slightly but the share prices of most listed asset managers have fallen steeply....
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