Business and Finance

Many of the world’s wealthiest investors remain traumatized by the losses they sustained during the financial crisis and are clutching on to safe, low-yielding assets rather than taking any risks.

Wealth managers say that even after a 75 percent rise in world stocks since March, a lot of clients’ money has yet to move. Investors have, in the words of one strategist, become “structurally risk averse.”

That is prompting investment managers to seek creative ways to unleash funds held in safe cash positions, and may be the key to sustaining this year’s rally in stocks and riskier assets.

Managers are enticing clients with guarantees of investment capital or by offering other rewards to make losses less likely.

It is a phenomenon similar to that seen in 2002-03 when investors were reeling from the bursting of the internet stocks bubble. So some may even have been twice burned.

How much is tied up is difficult to ascertain. Fund tracker EPFR Global reckons that some 94 percent of the net flows to U.S. money market funds it tracked in 2008 has already exited.

But going further back, it says U.S. money funds that report weekly took in a net $191 billion in 2007 as a whole. That suggests that the cash unwinding of the past two years is at most only two thirds through.

“There is a lot of juice,” said Michael Dicks, head of research and investment strategy at Barclays Wealth no fax no teletrack payday loan. “Even if they went half way from where they are now to where they were pre-crisis, that would produce a significant amount of momentum.”

PROTECT ME

Today’s problem for investment managers — who, of course, get their fees from clients making money and moving around assets — is that the stock market crash was so harsh that many investors are almost terminally gun-shy.

World equities did, after all, fall some 60 percent from peak to trough.

“Clients are still nervous — less so than they were a year ago but (they) are only getting back into markets very selectively,” said Phil Cutts, director at RBC Wealth management.

To combat this and the ultra-low rates paid on cash accounts, investors are being offered products that provide some form of protection or at least a sweetener to get them to dip back into risk.

Cutts’ RBC, for example, is touting a capital-guaranteed BRICs currency fund. Principal is returned in full if the Brazil, Russia, India and China basket — divided equally between real, ruble, rupee and yuan — underperforms the dollar.

But if it rises, investors get the principal plus the return on the basket. RBC then adds an additional 20 percent of the return. 

Read more