"If you run a portfolio of German Bunds that is going to return you the square root of absolutely nothing! If people want to generate excess returns they will have to move from passive to active fund management"
Mark Dowding, senior portfolio manager at BlueBay Asset Management, explains the new world of investing in sovereign debt
(see Credit specialists dive in as SSA investors take fright)
"The problem now is that there is no normal distribution of views. There is a lot of tail risk and a long list of binary outcomes...Overhanging all of this is the nagging feeling that there are no stabilizers or policy levers left"
Alan Brown, CIO of fund manager Schroders, on why these are the most treacherous markets he has ever experienced
(see Investment: Brownian notions)
"How can Carlyle or TPG or KKR know what is going on in rural China, in the guts of China. They don’t get their hands dirty. We are on the farm mucking out the pigs while they are seeking to own the supermarket that sells pork to the customers. They don’t know or understand this country"
Yan Weidong, a director of Chinese investment firm Synergy, on why you shouldn’t bet the farm on international private equity firms moving into the country