The MFSA’s outsourcing letter: what fund boards should do before year-end
Outsourcing has become the operating model for most small fund managers in Malta, and for good reason. It gives a board access to specialist people and systems it could not justify hiring for one or two funds. The MFSA accepts this. Its letter acknowledges that, with the right pre-appointment checks, outsourcing brings expertise that small […]
Reading a risk report as a director: ten questions to ask
Risk reports tend to grow. Each new regulation adds a table, each incident adds a chart, and before long the pack is thirty pages that nobody has time to read before the meeting. Yet the board’s responsibility has not changed: it must be able to show that it understood the fund’s risks and challenged the […]
Two tools aren’t enough: LMT calibration before 16 April 2027
The revisions to the UCITS Directive and the AIFMD made liquidity management tools a standard feature of every open-ended fund in the EU. Many managers dealt with the first step in early 2026 by adding two tools to their fund documents. The harder step, deciding exactly how those tools would work and proving the settings […]
The Long Lead
The Long Lead The market has priced the chips. It has not priced the copper box that energises them. A PROBLEM OF SEASONED OAK The Royal Navy’s difficulty, through the whole of the eighteenth century, was never ships. It was oak. A first-rate ship of the line consumed something in the region of two […]
Hour of Need
Hour of Need: Every hyperscaler claims to run on renewables. One of them publishes the hour-by-hour truth, and it has not improved since 2019. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Google has matched 100 per cent of its electricity consumption with renewable purchases every year since 2017. On an hourly, grid-by-grid basis it has been stuck at roughly […]
How To Invest For An Electrified Society
Never has so much financial muscle, nor religion of all stripes, or polities of all leanings been so aligned behind a single cause. Described by Francois Hollande as the ‘first universal agreement in history’, it is neither financial regulation or sanction, trade treaty or peace deal – it is an energy treaty. The culmination of […]
Learning To Live With Higher Inflation Volatility.
PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE… However, before we sound the all clear on the deflationary pulse that has characterised markets since perhaps the 1987 Asian financial crisis, investors must brace for a period of volatility in inflation numbers, in both directions; the rate of change nature of markets versus investor expectations will ensure that. […]
Renewable Diesel
Pyrolysis promises a remarkable opportunity to recycle tyres and plastics into energy dense renewable drop in fuels
Bio-Coal
Coal powered industrial steam turbines boilers dominate African industrial facilities, responsible for everyday items such as food, beverage plastics and packaging.
Recycled Solar Panels
The dark side of solar describes the impending waste mountain as PV panel deployments ramps at a ever faster clip