Weekly Wrap: Are the gloves off?

The big story of the week has to be the developing stouch between two associations representing advisers. The Institute of Financial Advisers has come out with some pretty strong, and emotive comments, about the Professional Advisers Association’s plans to prepare for regulation. You can read the story here and there is comment in Phil’s Blog too. Every adviser should be following this story and watching what happens. Getting our minds around tax changes continues to be an on-going theme of stories at the moment. This week we have two stories on the impacts of the new fair dividend rate.

One is that managers like AMP are expecting to move money from passive to active management. This is unsurprising as passive, under the old rules, enjoyed a significant tax advantage over active management. For AMP it is a significant issue as it has a huge amount of money in WiNZ. One point we will explore later is that passive management isn’t dead – it still has a place in a portfolio.

The other tax related one is based on comments from ABN Amro Craig suggesting not all ASX-listed shares are equal (under FDR). Rather the only ASX company shares to be treated as “local” are ones belonging to specified indices. Read about this here.

Adviser associations happily co-operating. Yeah right The idea that all the associations representing advisers can happily work together in the future is, I suspect, more of an inspirational goal than a reality. [more]

Also Fidelity Life has an IPO in the market place at the moment which has had its size increased by 50% due to demand. There is a news story here and also a Special Report on its unlisted version of the fund.