Ever since Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) released “Progress Report on Enhancing the Asset Management Business 2020” last June, a hot topic in the country has been the use of subadvisors to enhance asset management capability. Many of the world’s leading assets managers have served as subadvisors in Japan’stoshinmarket, but it is only with the recent success of foreign equity funds that their role has drawn significant attention. (Toshin是一个缩写toshi-shintaku, or investment trust akin to mutual funds and closed-end funds in the U.S.)
祥子Shinoda基金分析师Rakuten Securities Inc. says, “There has been an excessive focus on cost in the last few years, and subadvisors have been regarded as a contributor to increased costs. With the recent strength of the stock market, however, investors have realized that performance outweighs cost. Funds that have performed well, such as Baillie Gifford and ARK, have attracted attention and, as a result, the importance of subadvisors is being recognized.”
Shinoda identifies two types of subadvisors in Japan: asset managers who offer their own products and also serve as subadvisors, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and T. Rowe Price, and asset managers who act only as subadvisors, such as PIMCO.
One firm that has embraced the subadvisory trend is Mitsubishi UFJ Kokusai Asset Management (MUFGAM), which has AUM in outsourced funds of more than JPY 3 trillion with over 50 subadvisors. “We have our own foreign asset management products, but it is important to cooperate with other asset managers to provide investment opportunities in niche asset classes and newly emerging theme products for our investors and retailers. It is essential to offer products that differentiate us from other companies as market conditions dictate, as in the current investment climate of low interest rates and a dramatically changing stock market,” says Mamoru Oizumi, Senior Deputy General Manager of Product Development Division.
Yasuo Sasai, General Manager of Sub-Advised Fund Management Division, adds that it is “difficult for domestic asset managers to manage foreign assets with a bottom-up approach and continuously earn positive returns. It is beneficial for us to outsource the operation to local foreign players or invest in them as a fund of funds.”
Gatekeepers
Domestic asset managers act as gatekeepers who select asset managers and management strategies from an expansive field that includes everything from gigantic global managers to specialized boutique managers. So, how do they choose?
Mufgam使用五个标准：企业管理的质量和有效性;资产管理能力;能够稳定运作的管理;遵守;和信息供应。使用详细的定性评估和对投资团队和流程进行仔细审查，审查资产管理能力。根据Sasai的说法，通过查看RFP响应来评估投资过程的健全性。然而，不一定实施的建议。“只有通过对许多人进行面试细节，您可以知道特定的投资过程是否良好构思。”
对于定性评估，可重复性很重要。“你最近可能表现良好，但能够一直重复这一成功更为重要。萨莱说，重复成功的可能性取决于结果是否通过适当和合理的过程实现。“
“Differentiation in investment strategy is another a key factor in evaluating a subadvisor because you cannot outperform by using the same strategies as other asset managers,” he continues. “It’s not enough simply to be different, because that along can produce negative results.”
强度且稳定的过程受到高度重视，但调整环境变化也需要灵活性。在评估投资技能时必须考虑这种相互矛盾的考虑，这就是为什么门守判断是必要的。持续监测与门口的评估一样重要。在Mufgam，通过分布器执行的合同每天进行审核，以验证是否符合投资政策。每周，每月和季度审查表现，与市场运动相比。rfp至少每年发送一次分布器，以确定是否继续其服务合同。
“As a gatekeeper,” says Oizumi, “we not only assess performance, but also encourage improvement, such as in the quality and speed of reports produced when the market is changing rapidly.”
Quite a few active funds performed better than index funds in 2020, and some of them had generated considerably higher returns. Shinoda notes that “cutting off active funds based merely on cost is easy and goes against the effort to increase sophistication of the asset management industry. We now need discussions around how to evaluate active funds fairly.”
专注于积极资金将可能会增加今年，因为对分布商的关注和它们日益重要的作用toshinmarket.