Author: Lily Harper

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Milan’s Via Monte Napoleone has for the first time beaten New York and London to be the world’s most expensive shopping street, as the Italian city benefits from an influx of affluent tourists and fierce competition for prime real estate among luxury brands. Top rents that landlords can charge luxury retailers on the street have jumped 11 per cent in a year to €20,000 a square metre annually, the highest headline rent for shops in any of the 138 global retail destinations tracked…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Bridgewater, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, is joining forces with State Street’s asset management arm to tap retail investors in the latest effort by money managers to look for new customers beyond their traditional strengths.The partnership announced on Tuesday will start with an exchange traded fund that will track one of Bridgewater’s best-known strategies. State Street Global Advisers has filed plans with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an “All-Weather” ETF, which seeks to profit in all types of…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Bridgewater and State Street have just announced a “strategic relationship” to “widen access to core alternative investment strategies”. What does this actually mean? Well, it means a risk parity ETF! Look at what just landed in the SEC’s filing cabinet: “All Weather” is Bridgewater’s main risk parity strategy, and is a bit more passive than its flagship “Pure Alpha” macro strategy. In risk parity, a type of investing pioneered by Ray Dalio, an investor holds a broad array of asset classes —…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Deloitte is planning to cut 180 more jobs across its UK advisory divisions, the latest sign of weakness in the British consulting industry.The Big Four firm informed affected staff on Tuesday morning that their jobs were at risk in a restructuring which it said was necessary to navigate “challenging market conditions”, according to people familiar with the move.The cuts come on top of 800 redundancies announced in September 2023 and 100 more in February this year. The firm has also been pushing…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Abrdn’s new chief executive Jason Windsor has made sweeping leadership changes in a bid to improve the UK asset manager’s investment performance after a difficult period.The FTSE 250 group said on Tuesday that Rene Buehlmann, head of investments at Abrdn based in Singapore, would leave the business. He will be replaced by Xavier Meyer, Abrdn’s chief client officer based in the UK.David Scott, Abrdn’s chief enterprise technology officer who sits on the company’s executive team, is set to retire from the business.As…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.European regulators found there would be only a “limited impact” on the financial system from the EU’s drive to cut carbon emissions by 55 per cent by 2030, even if it caused investors to ditch polluting companies.The EU’s top financial watchdogs on Tuesday said their first stress test to estimate how the fight against climate change would affect banks, insurers, pension funds and investors concluded it “would not be a concern for financial stability per se during the green transition”. Over the eight-year…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Goldman Sachs’ chief executive has warned that global investors are still “predominantly on the sidelines” over deploying capital in China because of weak consumer confidence and difficulties getting money out of the country.David Solomon said investors “continue to be concerned” about cashing out of investments in the world’s second-largest economy.“It’s been very difficult over the course of the last five years to get capital out,” he told an event on Tuesday organised by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the territory’s de facto…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Elliott Management has become one of the three biggest shareholders in Tokyo Gas, as it seeks to push the Japanese utility to focus on its energy business and scale back a property portfolio that the activist investor estimates could be worth as much as $9bn.Elliott, whose 5 per cent stake was made public on Tuesday in a stock exchange filing, has calculated that the unrealised market value of Tokyo Gas’s real estate holdings is worth about ¥1.5tn ($9.7bn), almost the equivalent of…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For an industry judged on its performance figures, investment management is proving a laggard when it comes to the number of female fund managers it employs.Latest global statistics say just 12.5 per cent of portfolio managers — the front line of investment decision-making — are women. “What’s even more surprising is that this number has declined over the past decade and appears to be stagnating rather than progressing at a significant pace of change,” says the Diversity Project — an industry body…

One scoop to start: Donald Trump’s social media company is in advanced talks to buy Bakkt, a cryptocurrency trading venue owned by Intercontinental Exchange, as it pushes to expand beyond online conversation.And the latest from a mega-deal: Nippon Steel’s top executives are meeting local officials and workers of US Steel in Pennsylvania this week as the Japanese group makes a post-election push to build on-the-ground support for a $15bn takeover that has faced bipartisan political opposition.Welcome to Due Diligence, your briefing on dealmaking, private equity and corporate finance. This article is an on-site version of the newsletter. Premium subscribers can…