All Alternatives articles – Page 124
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Features
Patience is the watchword
The €560m Nordurlands Lifeyrissjodur is a pan-industry private pension fund for employees in Iceland’s Northern Province. Its 12,000 members include workers in the fishing and manufacturing industries, as well as the service sectors. The hybrid scheme is biased towards the defined contribution model, although it is obliged to pay a ...
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Features
Seeking new sources of return
The first of its kind, the New Sources of Return Survey for 2005 undertaken by asset manager JP Morgan Asset Management, questioned 125 representatives of 120 of the largest US pension plans. Both corporate and public plans were included, as well as a few non-profit, Taft-Hartley, and other plans. Differences ...
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Features
Three months positive
Despite the poor performance of stock markets (especially the small cap and growth stock segments), hedge funds managed to take advantage of the good performance of bond markets and the rally on the commodity markets to post positive returns for the third month in a row. CTA Global funds achieved ...
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Features
Intimate world of private placements
Private placements (PPs) are private as opposed to public securities. In the case of PPs, securities are offered directly to a limited number of investors and are exempt from stock exchange listing or public registration and usually unrated. The most common form of private securities are long-term, fixed-rate debt. These ...
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Features
Infrastructure’s long-term payback
Pension funds are trying to spread their investments across a much wider spectrum of asset classes than in the past. More ‘alternative’ products are being offered on the market to meet the insatiable demand from institutions. One area now attracting increasing attention in Europe is infrastructure investment. The term immediately ...
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Features
More haste, less speed
Worldwide, pension funds have shown an interest in hedge funds as part of a holistic solution to achieve absolute returns. They are perceived as complementing, not competing, with other asset classes. Contrary to media headlines in the recent past, however, pension funds’ allocations will be very small; with less than ...
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Features
Land of good intentions
Iceland has a population of only 300,000 and a GDP of €7bn. However, there are around 20 pension funds worth well over a hundred million euros, with the biggest ones worth more than a billion. But private equity as a pension fund asset is still in its early stages, though ...
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Features
Strong FoF summer recovery continues
Riding the recovery wave that began in May and rose in June, global markets continued to yield very good returns for funds of funds all round. The Eurekahedge Global Fund of Funds Index returned 1.6% in July and tentatively is up 0.8% in August The best performance came from funds ...
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Features
Finding the best way to spread bets
Diversification is the byword for investing in listed equities. But for investing in private equity - a much more risky asset class - the importance of spreading one’s bets is far greater. The basic route into private equity is via a fund investing in a basket of individual companies. However, ...
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Features
Leveraged loans: a separate and strategic asset cl
In the last 15 years, the leveraged loans market has first developed in the US and more recently in Europe thanks to the growing participation of institutional investors. Leveraged loans emerge now as a separate and strategic asset class that should be considered in the asset allocation process by any ...
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Features
Measured approach
The past few years has seen tremendous institutional investor inflows into commodities. Most investors have chosen to adopt a passive exposure to begin with. It means that choosing a commodity index is one of the most important decisions that an investor can make. It is sometimes easy to forget that ...
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Features
The alternative alternatives
Timber It has been much ignored by institutional investors, and yet timber has offered some of the strongest returns of the last decade. The asset class produced an annual compounded return of 12.44% in the period between 1989 and 2003, according to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries ...
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Features
All absolutes are not created equal
During recent years, particularly since 2000, there has been substantial and growing interest in absolute return investing. We believe there are two types of approach to absolute return investing and it is critical to understand the differences. One form is the hedge fund style – an approach that targets relatively ...
