All articles by David White – Page 10
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Features
Right time, right place
Raiffeisen Capital Management (RCM), the asset manager of the Raiffeisen banking group, is an Austrian firm with European ambitions and e30bn in assets under management. It has a dominant position in Austria, where it has 22% share of the overall market and 26% of institutional business, and a growing share ...
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Features
Tracking smarter money
Now that asset managers have access to financial information resources like FactSet the hurdle to entry into the mainstream use of quant techniques has been lowered. Managers who want to gain or maintain a competitive advantage must focus on areas with a higher entry hurdle, where the information is less ...
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Features
Still scratching heads
Currently, there is some concern that member states will not meet the September deadline for implementing the IORP directives. However Ivo van Es, the European Commission official in charge of the implementation of the directive, has said that the EC expects all 26 member states to fulfil their obligations. So ...
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Features
Ask the expert systems
Over 30 years ago, the US economist Benjamin Graham distinguished two basic approaches to investing – qualitative and quantitative. In his book ‘The intelligent investor’, he wrote: “The first or predictive approach could also be called the qualitative approach, since it emphasises prospects, management and other non-measurable, although highly important, ...
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News
Fund body EFAMA names new president
EUROPE – Investment fund association EFAMA has appointed a new president and vice president.
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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
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
Independence is driving force
When Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was on the brink of default in 1998, one area of its operations gave no cause for concern - its back office-processing infrastructure. This continued functioning smoothly, and ensured that no payments to creditors were missed and that it did not have to re-state its ...
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Features
A step in the right direction
Northern Trust Global Investments (NTGI), the asset management arm of Chicago-based banking company Northern Trust, is among the top three players worldwide in three fields: securities lending - which it regards as part of its investment management business - passive management, and manager of managers. Of NTGI’s e466bn in assets ...
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Features
Core satellite thinking in orbit
Funds of hedge funds are now pension funds’ preferred route into hedge fund investing. Of the €1.2bn invested in hedge funds by Europe’s 50 largest pension funds, €920m is in the hands of funds of hedge funds, according to Boston-based research consultancy Cerulli Associates. One effect of this has been ...
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Features
Sharing and caring
Currently, employers bear the investment risk in defined benefit (DB) pension plans while employees bear the risk in defined contribution (DC) type plans. Recent equity market performance, longevity risk and the impact of international accounting rules have persuaded many employers to introduce a DC alternative to their DB plans. This ...
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News
New warning over schemes’ equity concentration
UK - UK pension funds’ tendency to expose themselves to a handful of FTSE companies could end with the collapse of some of the big names, says Hymans Robertson principal George Henshilwood.
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Features
A true pioneer
Pioneer Investments is the global asset manager that was created in 2000 when Italian banking group UniCredito acquired the US investment firm Pioneer Group and merged it with its own asset management company, EuroPlus Research and Management. The acquisition gave UniCredito’s asset management arm a global reach, since Pioneer brought ...
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Features
Pay or prerequisite?
Two views of pensions have developed in Europe. One is that a pension, whether provided by government or private sector, is effectively deferred pay. In this view, members of defined benefit (DB) pension schemes exchange pay today for future pensions. In other words, people will accept wages at lower than ...
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Features
Fund with know-how
The way corporate pension funds are managed will change with changes in the corporations that sponsor them. Few organisations demonstrate this better than DSM Pensions Services (DPS), the in-house organisation that manages the Dutch pension funds of the Dutch firm DSM, the former Dutch state mines. The company was once ...
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Features
Right at the core
The number of European pension funds employing core satellite strategies has grown steadily. Research suggests that only 5% of pension funds were using core-satellite strategies in 1995. This had risen to 15% in 2000 and is likely to have more than doubled since the. The attraction of core satellite is ...
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Special Report
Where does the buck stop?
Is there an optimal model of pension fund governance? If so, how should it be applied to Europe’s occupational pension plans? These were the key questions at a discussion on pension fund governance organised by pension fund consultants Akkermans Stroobants & Partners in Antwerp recently, attended by pension fund managers, ...
