All IPE articles in December 2005 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Features
Swiss in 2% rate plea
Pension fund association ASIP has urged the government to lower the guaranteed return on pension contributions, insisting that the move is critical to improving the financial health of its members. Earlier this year, the Swiss government decided to leave the rate in question at 2.5%. “An adjustment to the ...
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Features
Iceland casts eye abroad
The Icelandic pension fund sector is undergoing parallel developments that are having a direct impact on the management of its assets. The first is an ongoing process of consolidation, which has gradually reduced the number of pension funds from an original 100 to a current 48 and which is anticipated ...
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Features
Peers acknowledge the 'constant gardener' of Europe
This year’s winner of the Award for an Outstanding Industry Contribution to is Koen De Ryck. He was the clear favourite among the 18 candidates who were on the list that IPE readers were asked to vote on. That comes as no surprise, given his dedicated service that can be ...
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Features
Adventurous allocation soon starts to pay dividend
As pension funds look around for innovative ways of boosting their income from traditional asset classes, private equity is moving into the mainstream as a way of achieving this. Länsförsäkringar Liv Försäkrings (LF) of Sweden has become a pioneer in developing this asset class as an integral part of a ...
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Features
Risk manager or trusted adviser?
Across Europe, the pensions landscape is ostensibly one that conveys difficult and unwanted messages. Liabilities are typically large in comparison to the market capitalisation of sponsor companies. Schemes are generally poorly funded. From an adviser’s perspective, risks are also large due to the volatility arising from mis-matched asset mixes and ...
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Features
Life after attribution
Your managers may be investing in new risk and attribution capabilities, but are they ready for the knock-on effects? As an investor in the fixed income funds, you may not be too concerned with the relationship between your manager’s front, middle and back offices. As long as your funds are ...
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Features
Negative times here again
Against a backdrop of lacklustre performance in almost all markets (eg, stocks, bonds and commodities), and more generally, of a decline in the risk appetite of investors, all hedge fund strategies performed negatively in October, for the first time since April. Unsurprisingly, the strategies most harshly hit by the fall ...
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Features
Why pensions funds are on agenda
Over the last two years, the spotlight at investment banks has been directed towards pension funds. The banks have set up their own pensions groups to tackle the problems of liability mismatches and other risk issues. But if the banks serve corporate clients, how and why did they end up ...
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Features
An alternative to ordinary mandatory insurance funds
The Frjálsi Pension Fund was established in 1978 and is one of the oldest and largest non-mandatory pension funds in Iceland, Traditionally, pension funds in Iceland have used all of the 10% mandatory contribution to provide coinsurance rights but the founders of the scheme wanted to create an alternative to ...
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Features
More questions than answers
How deep will the changes to the pension accounting rules go? How will they affect companies’ financial strategies? Will they trigger the termination of defined benefit (DB) plans in the private sector? These are just a few of the questions haunting the US pension funds’ industry after the Financial Accounting ...
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Features
Difficult to apply
Behavioural finance achieved real respectability three years ago when Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in this area. Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky are best known for their work on Prospect Theory. A simple rendering of this theory would be that people have an irrational tendency ...
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Features
Three-pronged approach brings flexibility and focus
Danish pension fund ATP has won this year’s country award for its excellence in four main areas: investments, pension policy and liability side issues, overall objectives and risk tolerance, and dealing with the interdependence between these three areas. The fund believes that what distinguishes it from other pension funds is ...
