Asset Allocation – Page 186
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Special Report
Active dialogue comes to fore
Gradually, socially responsible investment (SRI) is becoming more ingrained in the way that participants in the market do business. A survey by Mercer Investment Consulting in April concluded that SRI practices were becoming mainstream among investment managers. Within 10 years, it said, SRI would become a common component of mainstream ...
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Features
Case for active style allocation
Al though the existing literature seems to concur on the interest of hedge funds as valuable investment alternatives, there seem to be several shortcomings in current industry practice when it comes to fully capitalising on the advantages of including hedge funds in an investor’s asset allocation. So far, the only ...
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Features
The turning of the screw
Would you be willing to lock up investments for your grandchildren to use in 50 years time if the return was going to be fixed at 4.21% annually for the total period? The answer for most people would be obviously no. Yet the French treasury issued e6bn of 50 year ...
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Features
Use risk wisely
The belief that risk management means merely minimising or eliminating investment risk has few followers today. It is now widely accepted that investment risk is necessary to drive returns, and that it is the function of risk management to enable the asset manager to maximise the use of risk to ...
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Features
Pensions in a nutshell
Oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell is running a feasibility study on the possibilities of merging its worldwide pension asset and investment advice departments. According to Shell spokesman Henk Bonder the initial focus is on combining the asset and investment advice departments of its UK and Dutch pension funds. This does not ...
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Features
Lattelekom: one of a kind
First Closed Pension Fund, the pension fund for telecoms and electricity supply workers in Latvia, is the only registered pension fund in the country where the employers are also the pension fund’s shareholders. One of the legal requirements of the Latvia’s reformed pension system is that companies that wish to ...
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Features
Joined-up thinking
Robin Ellison, the incoming chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), may not be the first UK pension person to lose their bearings in Brussels. But he’s almost certainly the only one to actually get completely lost in the Belgian countryside. It occurred when he was en route ...
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Features
Politicians play hardball
According to the government official statistics, the ratio of people 65 years old and over in Japan would double from 17.3% in 2000 to 35.7% in 2050. Without substantial reforms, social security pensions would be unsustainable in this century, so the pension reform is currently the biggest political and economical ...
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Special Report
Who's for governance?
Corporate governance has been on the agenda for many years, but for most pension schemes the attention has been focused on the governance of the companies in which they invest rather than the governance of the pension fund itself. Now, however, pension schemes and their governing boards are being subject ...
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Features
Oil for extra virgin wheels
Italy’s new defined contribution (DC) schemes have got off to a slow start. Having become operational only a few years ago, assets under management of the industry-specific contrattuali - literally contractual, or closed - schemes were just short of E6bn at the end of September, with just over a million ...
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Features
Mounting concerns over workforce size
The EU issued some worrying population projections for the next 50 years, with a view to updating pension expenditure forecasts in the EU25. Also, the European Federation for Retirement Provision (EFRP) told the Commission that its push to eliminate tax discrimination of pension funds was moving ahead too slowly. The ...
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Features
Chickens come home to roost
In late 1993 the Croatian government instituted an economic stabilisation programme that was extraordinarily successful in curbing hyperinflation. But it led indirectly to the creation of a pension debt that delayed the introduction of a second and third pillar and more than a decade later threatens the country’s fiscal stability ...
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Features
The eye of CEIOPS
Ahead of the 23 September deadline for the implementation of European occupational retirement provision (IORP), directive the Committee of European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Supervisors (CEIOPS) has published a discussion paper on the role of supervisory co-operation in facilitating membership of cross-border pension funds. Europe has a wide diversity of ...
