All IPE articles in April 2005 (Magazine) – Page 3
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Features
Real estate has proven its worth
It is that time of year again. Numbers have been crunched, figures analysed, reports prepared. Trustees have received information on the year just gone and for most it has not been too bad. In the UK and US, equities outperformed bonds. Okay, in much of continental Europe this was not ...
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Special Report
Mark of excellence
In January Brussels-based Independent SRI and CSR advisory and research organisation Ethibel launched its new ‘excellence’ certification in an attempt to appeal directly to institutional investors. This, coming hot on the heels of the new disclosure law on SRI for pension funds, will give a boost to Belgium’s SRI market, ...
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Features
Retirement programmes: extreme makeover
With his mandate re-affirmed, Bush has prioritised two ambitious goals within the ‘ownership society’ – privatising social security and revamping the private pension system. Such boldness is not rhetorical: Bush’s previous term demonstrated a commitment to his fundamental agenda. The President has not previously shied from audacity; having been re-elected, ...
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Features
Finding a niche idea
Few European asset managers can boast the pedigree of the Swiss investment manager Pictet Asset Management. Pictet is the affiliate of banking group Pictet & Cie, one of the oldest private banks in Switzerland and currently celebrating 200 years in the money management business. Age brings wisdom, and one of ...
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Features
Sophisticated Finns reap returns
In investment terms, Finland forms part of the Nordic region. As such, therefore, it is one of the most sophisticated European countries in relation to the private equity market.Finland invested 0.307% of its GDP in private equity in 2003, the last year for which figures are available from the European ...
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Features
Managers: focus on return
Last year US pension funds’ median return was 11.7% for corporate and 12.5% for public funds, according to Russell Mellon universes performance data – a good result. But it is the legacy of the past five years that has done the damage, with annual returns averaging just 3.6% for corporate ...
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Features
Shaping tomorrow's hedge funds
The writer Mark Twain memorably pronounced that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. Today he could be suggesting a similar sentiment about hedge funds. Overall trends suggest hedge funds are here to stay. Consider that the average hedge fund had its 17th consecutive positive year in 2004, showing a ...
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Features
Still waiting for the future
By far the most important development in the Belgian pensions market has been the provisions for industry-wide pension schemes set out in the Vandenbroucke Law which came into effect at the beginning of last year. The main aim of the law – to boost second-pillar pension provision by creating industry-wide ...
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Features
Sorting the sheep from the goats
The Gothenburg-based Andra AP-fonden (AP2), one of the national ‘buffer’ funds of Sweden’s pension system, took the unusual step last year of terminating 16 of its domestic and European equity mandates at one stroke. This bold move was part of a strategic decision to draw a clearer distinction between the ...
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Features
The search for the holy grail
The Capital Asset Pricing Model of financial theory is the root of the Alpha, Beta distinction. This model is shown below: where R is the return from respectively the portfolio and market, alpha and beta the objects of interest and epsilon a residual error term. This is a simple linear ...
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Features
Lego: piecing it together
When the founder of the Lego company, Ole Kirk Christiansen, came up with the brand name, he was apparently unaware that it means ‘I put together’ in Latin. It is appropriate in this context as that is exactly what the company, based in Billund, Denmark, has been doing recently with ...
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Features
Where the long-run returns lie
Markets are volatile, with much variation in year-to-year returns: we need long time series to make inferences. The periods we examine must be long enough to incorporate the good, the bad and the indifferent times. In this article we provide an update on long-run returns on stocks, bonds, bills, and ...
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Features
Wealth market lure
One of the fastest growing and most profitable segments within financial services, the wealth management marketplace is also highly competitive and fragmented, with independent research showing that no single provider holds more than 2% of the wealth market. Indeed, the top 20 providers globally represent only 12% of financial assets ...
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Features
Only one strategy makes it
As can be seen from table 1, all hedge fund strategies fell short of their long-term average performance in January. Three out of five strategies even posted negative returns. These poor results, which are in sharp contrast to the good performance of Q4 2004, were mainly due to an unfavourable ...
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Features
Turning to private markets
The expectation of continuing low returns over the next decade has left investors scrambling for new approaches to asset allocation, desiring to move beyond the horizons of modern portfolio theory and on to the postmodern universe. One stab at defining a postmodern portfolio theory is presented in a recent report ...
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Features
Number one priority
Vladimir Spidla, the EU’s social affairs commissioner, is optimistic when he thinks ahead to tackling Europe’s looming pension crisis. As former minister of labour and social affairs in the Czech Republic, and subsequently the country’s premier, he has considerable experience of state pension reform – and he refuses to see ...
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Features
Spending risk in the right places
Most pension funds currently use a two-stage process in determining investment strategy. First, they determine their strategic asset allocation (SAA) using asset liability modelling based on the unique liability characteristics of the fund. This creates the allocation to various asset classes known as the policy benchmark. Managers are then appointed ...
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