Australia's funds management industry is in a state of flux. In fact, this journalist is beginning to run out of tired clichés to describe it.
Merry-go-round, musical chairs, card shuffling, it all amounts to the same thing - fund managers are swapping jobs like never before.
Already this year Investor Weekly has lost count of all the changes. In the interests of bringing a little clarity to the situation, therefore, we have decided to provide a brief summary of some of the more high-profile moves.
The year opened with news that Credit Suisse Asset Management's (CSAM) small caps team had itchy feet.
By March, small caps co-heads Stephen Atkinson and Matthew Booker had gone their separate ways.
Atkinson joined fund manager MMC Asset Management and Booker joined boutique small caps shop Paradice Investment Management.
CSAM has since poached ING Investment Management's small caps team. It announced earlier this month that Issam Eid, Steven Ng and Rajeev de Silva were joining the firm.
CSAM's popular equities boss, Andrew Fleming, also decided to move on this year, throwing his lot in with Schroder Investment Management. Fleming will work with head of Australian equities Martin Conlon.
Fleming's replacement at CSAM is the largely untested Stephen Guibin, who joins from none other than . Schroders.
At about the same time as CSAM was licking its wounds and searching for new blood in March, fund manager Invesco lost its long-time head of Australian equities, Rohan Walsh, followed shortly after by portfolio manager Luke Sinclair. Walsh and Sinclair joined Portfolio Partners founder David Slack to found a boutique manager called Karara Capital out of what used to be Bell Asset Management and Bell Potter Asset Management.
Former Bell Group employees Ned Bell and Stuart Nixon also joined them.
In April, Allianz-owned manager RCM announced its withdrawal from the Australian equities market after the defection of its head, Jakov Males, to the UBS equity team as a property analyst.
Not to be outdone, BT Financial has also had its fair share of staff disappearing acts this year. In February, its head of alternative investments, Richard Keary, resigned from the firm, as well as Australian shares portfolio manager Troy Angus.
Keary has since turned up at MFS as its head of alternative strategies.
Angus signed up with small caps specialist Paradice Investment Management.
Next to suffer withdrawal symptoms was Colonial First State. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia-owned fund manager, which has struggled in the performance league tables recently, lost its head of Australian equities, Simon Shields, and his deputy, Jim Taylor, within a week.
Taylor eloped to rival BT Financial Group to run its Australian equities operation. Shields on the other hand surprised everyone, including his former boss, David Dixon, who read the news in the paper, by replacing Paul Fiani as head of UBS Asset Management's (UBSAM) Australian equities team.
Rumours are flying around the industry that Fiani felt compelled to leave his job as head of Australian equities at UBS because of his refusal to sell UBSAM's stake in Qantas to the Macquarie-led takeover consortium.
Newspaper reports suggested there was a conflict of interest between the investment banking side of UBS, that stood to make millions out of the Qantas deal, and the asset management side of the business, which effectively doomed the $11.1 billion deal to failure.
UBS, however, has strenuously denied this speculation. Fiani himself decided to take a holiday. We assume he flew Qantas.
