All Alternatives articles – Page 159
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News
PGGM spends E30m to hedge against inflation
NETHERLANDS – The 48 billion-euro Dutch healthcare pension fund PGGM has spent 30 million euros to hedge its pension commitments against inflation.
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Features
Absolute rules
Chastened by the experience of a three-year bear market in equities, European pension funds are moving from away from traditional benchmarks and relative returns toward ‘liability-driven’ strategies and absolute returns. Certainly this is the picture that alternative asset managers, and some traditional asset managers, are painting. Mark Rosenberg, head of ...
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Features
Gaining efficient access to hedge fund strategies
Funds of hedge funds (FoHF) have become a popular way for new hedge fund investors, both private and institutional, to gain access to the attractive performance characteristics of hedge fund strategies. These products provide investors with efficient exposure to a diverse range of alternative investment strategies and the unique skills ...
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Features
Nestle stays ahead of the pack
The €4bn Nestlé pension fund in Switzerland has perhaps gone farthest down the road of any European pension fund in embracing alternative investment in the pursuit of absolute returns. Its current exposure of 15% of assets to hedge funds is probably the largest of any pension fund in the world. ...
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Features
How much should be allocated to alternatives?
A new study carried out by Dexia Asset Management shows the benefits of allocating 15% to 20% of a portfolio to alternative funds. Finding a good balance between risk and return is the first aim of any investment strategy. Modern portfolio management theory suggests diversification, so as to cope with ...
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Features
Art for investment's sake
Any dealer will give prospective investors the same advice – spend as much as you can afford, buy the very best work available and be prepared to hold on to it for 10 years. This mantra is central to the ethos of Philip Hoffman’s new Fine Art Fund. Hoffman, a ...
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Features
The benefit of the relative value strategy
Besides being an asset class in their own right, hedge funds can also be considered and used as a diversification tool within a specific traditional asset class. To incorporate hedge funds as a separate asset class into a global diversified portfolio, it is recommended to select the appropriate number of ...
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Features
Come on in, the water's lovely
Alternative investment strategies are registering notably high satisfaction rates in terms of performance among European institutional investors – despite the three-year bear market. The percentage of investors whose returns have so far met or exceeded expectations ranges from 66% for private equity, 79% for hedge fund investment and impressive figures ...
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Features
Lose your constraints
Claire Smith A couple of years ago, currency overlay mandates were fairly few and far between. Most pension funds left overseas currency exposures unhedged and those that did seek to manage them sought, in the main, to expunge the risk and accept the resulting profit or loss as simply part ...
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Features
Delivering the performance
Most investors recognise that currencies have a large impact on the returns of international and global portfolios. By selecting a multi-currency benchmark, the investor, implicitly or explicitly, makes decisions on a set of underlying assets and on the desired level of embedded currency exposure. There is a need to analyse ...
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Features
Safe in the forest
Forestry investment has attracted increasing attention in recent years from pension fund managers looking for alternatives to the uncertainty and lower returns experienced with the major asset classes. A key feature of Irish forestry investments has been the steady positive real rate of return, with the lowest volatility of any ...
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Features
Taking a shine to gold
A liquid asset with low correlation with equities and fixed income and negative correlation with the dollar should be relatively easy to sell. Yet funds have shown an almost complete aversion to gold. A raft of new investment products and a sustained educational campaign by the World Gold Council (WGC), ...
