Author: Natsuko Waki

“Abenomics” — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s aggressive reflationary fiscal and monetary policy — is widely praised for injecting optimism into the world’s third largest economy and making Tokyo stocks the best performing equity market in the world this year.

However, in Japan, something odd is happening as a result of Abenomics — a big shortage of squid.

Japan Squid Fisheries Association (JAFRA) decided to halt all fishing operations this Friday and Saturday because a weaker yen is pushing petrol prices higher, to the extent that going out to the sea will bring a guaranteed loss. The yen has lost more than 13 percent against the dollar since the start of the year.

Squid fishing is highly energy-intensive because fishers use light to lure squid at night. Fuel makes up around a third of the cost of fishing.

There is a government subsidy for fishermen when energy prices surge. But according to JAFRA, even with the subsidy, the average loss per boat can go up to as much as 200,000 yen ($2,009) per year at the current dollar/yen exchange level of around 100.

The temporary halt is only affecting squid fishing, but people are worried other fishermen may be forced to follow suit if the yen weakens further. The Federation of Japan Fisheries Cooperatives is planning an emergency meeting to ask the government for more financial help.

As a result of the two-day halt, retail squid prices are almost certain to rise (the popular way to eat it is as raw, in sashimi). Then again, it may help introduce inflation in Japan?

As CalPERS considers switching all of its portfolios to passive investing,  questioning the effectiveness of active equity investment, there have been some interesting findings that would stir up the active vs passive debate.

Researchers at Cass Business School find that equity indexes constructed randomly by “monkeys” would have produced higher risk-adjusted returns (ie return adjusted by measuring how much risk is involved in producing that return) than an equivalent market capitalisation-weighted index over the last 40 years.

How does this work? Using 43 years of U.S. equity data, researchers programmed a computer to randomly pick and weight each of the 1,000 stocks in the sample, effectively simulating the stock-picking abilities of a monkey.The process was repeated 10 million times over each of the 32 years of the study.  Nearly all 10 million indices weighted by chance delivered vastly superior returns to the market cap approach. Andrew Clare, co-author of the paper, says:

“The results of this experiment showed that many of the monkey fund managers would have generated a superior performance than was produced by some of the alternative indexing techniques.  However, perhaps most shockingly we found that nearly every one of the 10 million monkey fund managers beat the performance of the market cap-weighted index.”

But investment advisers are not fully convinced that active is the way. A survey by housing investment specialist Castle Trust shows one in three advisers do not believe they can beat the index over five years. Sean Oldfield, chief executive officer, Castle Trust says:

“Concern over the long-term ability of active managers to outperform their benchmark indices is well-documented and is recognised by advisers. They clearly recognise the need to deliver long-term performance for their clients and that should mean at least a core holding of index- tracking investments.”

The emergence of “smart beta” approach — kind of half way between active and passive investing — is prompting pension funds to reconsider equities. Read the analysis here.

Despite the early-year rally in equity markets, some hedge funds seem to have had a disappointing start… yet again.

JP Morgan notes that the industry’s benchmark HFRI index was up 2.8% by end-February,  well below the 4.6% for MSCI All-Country index.

Some 4.2 percent of hedge funds suffered losses of at least 5% in the first two months of year, compared with 3.3% in the same period in 2012. Still, this is better than 2008/2009, when losses of this magnitude were seen at more than one in five of hedge funds. According to JP Morgan:

In all, this performance picture is rather unexciting, raising the chance that hedge funds will add risk near term to chase the current momentum in equity markets. This performance chasing happened in each of the previous two years, with hedge funds raising their betas during March/April of 2011 or 2012.

Within hedge funds, a strategy mixing long and short positions performed best. Japan long/short strategy returned 7.44 % so far this year, while China long/short and European long/short gained 6.15% and 4.35% respectively, according to Deutsche Bank.

Still, it seems some investors in the $2-trillion-plus hedge fund industry are not as return ambitious as they used to be. The 2013 survey of hedge funds by Deutsche Bank shows that 79% of institutional investors are targeting returns of 5-10% for their hedge fund portfolios. Back in 2013, more than half of investors surveyed were targeting double-digit returns.

“Abenomics” is the buzzword in Japan these days — it refers to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s aggressive reflationary fiscal and monetary policies that triggered the yen’s 10 percent decline against the dollar and 17 percent rally in Tokyo stocks this year.

So it’s no wonder that the Japanese mutual fund market, the second largest in Asia-Pacific, enjoyed the largest monthly inflows in almost six years last month, raking in as much as $11 billion.

With all that new money coming in, will you be late to the game if you haven’t gone in already?

French fund manager Carmignac Gestion does not think so.

Carmignac, whose fund already has a 10 percent allocation to Japanese stocks, says investors’ general loss of interest in Japan since the 1990s has resulted in very low valuations. It estimates Japan’s price-to-book ratio is less than 0.7 times.

So it would seem that the equity market’s 20 percent rise over three months has not exhausted investment opportunities in Japan, provided that currency risk is fully hedged.

Morgan Stanley, however, has this health warning:

PM Abe has started with all policy guns blazing. For 2014, in order to keep growth going and end deflation, he will need to reload. Micro reform policies are his only new bullets. Market stability depends on him firing more, larger calibre ones.

If the pure pursuit of greed is no longer good in the post-crisis world, what defines the new “good”?

That’s when you start to consider “Impact Investing”, a type of investment that pursues measurable social and environmental impacts alongside a financial return.  According to a report prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation, approximately 2,200 impact investments worth $4.4 billion were made in 2011.

But those who may be ideally placed to pursue Impact Investing are still largely absent from the exercise — sovereign wealth funds from the Persian Gulf, according to a recent paper published by academics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Authors Asim Ali and Shatha Al-Aswad at Tufts’ Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative argue that Persian Gulf states can deploy their SWFs in impact investing, via Islamic finance, to help develop their economies.

Islamic finance, with its focus on moral and social objectives, and specifically Sovereign Wealth Funds, as long-term investors, are ideally positioned to pursue impact investing… to foster social impact and economic development in the broader economy.

At a time when there has been much questioning of the values underpinning the conventional financial system, Islamic finance presents an alternative to traditional finance by offering both financial return, as well as a theoretical foundation for ethical investing, which, we argue, extends logically to investments that directly impact social and economic development.

Governments’ role is key in promoting impact investing, the Rockefeller report says.

Governments can encourage impact investing through appropriate investment rules, targeted co-investment, taxation, subsidies and procurement, as well as corporate legislation and capacity development that enable the efforts of investors, intermediaries and enterprises in this space.