IRELAND - The 10.5 billion-euro Irish National Pension Reserve Fund has awarded Arcadian Asset Management a small-cap mandate worth one percent of the fund.

Arcadian will manage a newly awarded Europe, Australasia and Far East mandate worth about 100 million euros benched against the FTSE Developed Small-Cap excluding North America Index.

Spokesman Adrian Donovan told IPE that the fund had selected Arcadian looking at criteria such as organisation of the company, employees, investment process, performance and value.

The selection has been conducted in a two-stage process, he added.

UBS Global Asset Management is in charge of a small-cap US mandate benched against the Russell 2000 index.

Mandates involving bonds passive management, the management of the unallocated cash and the centralised currency overlay programme are managed by the National Treasury Management Agency internally.

The National Pensions Reserve Fund Commission has set guidelines and parameters but ‘tactical and day to day investment decisions’ are delegated to the individual managers, says the pension fund on its web site.

“The Fund continued to make progress through the second quarter of 2004 with a return of 1.8% bringing the total return for the year to date to 4.5%,” the fund says in its second-quarter report.

Over the quarter, the fund said, equities have provided ‘mildly positive’ and bonds ‘mildly negative’ returns.

At the end of June, the fund had 74.2% allocated to Equities, 12.8% to bonds, and 13% to cash and other asset classes.