Allocation

NEW YORK and LONDON – Europe is staging a comeback in investor portfolios while concerns about the U.S. fiscal cliff have taken center stage, according to the BofA Merrill Lynch Fund Manager Survey for September.

According to John Gilbert, CIO of the Berkshire Hathaway’s subsidiary General Re-New England AM, French 10-year bonds should yield between 4.5% and 5%, closer to Italian and Spanish bonds rather than German ones. However, This opinion is not shared by the majority of the fund managers interviewed ...

Mega companies are bigger than most countries. Quite a few pharma, food, oil and tech companies reach annual revenues of over $50 bln, exceeding the GDP levels of more than 2/3 of the countries in the world. Unusually, these mega companies have performed better than the broad equity markets in the past 12 months.

Results of the Greenwich Associates 2012 U.K. Investment Management Study reveal that the U.K. institutional investment market should continue to expand over at least the next decade or two, but changing product demand will fundamentally shake up the source of revenues for asset managers.

If regulators think the Facebook IPO was a scandal, they should look at the German government bond market...