All Diary of An Investor articles – Page 3
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DB, DC and all that
Wasserdicht’s Dutch pension fund is one of the few that has maintained a strong solvency ratio throughout the crisis of the past few years.
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How do you colour-code that?
At Wasserdicht Pensioenfonds, some of our trustees have started to scrutinise our internal investment organisation.
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FeaturesWhat do you want to know?
Diary of an Investor: At Wasserdicht Pension Funds, the investment team generally gets on with the job of running the fund’s money in the way the trustees tell us to.
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More buckets
Last month, for the first time, we experimented with a new approach to our monthly international strategy meeting. Video conferencing.
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In the pipeline
It’s a fine September morning and I am over the North Sea in a helicopter together with Geert, our bright young spark in the investment department. But it’s not just a day out and we are all dressed in hard hats and waterproofs since we are on our way visit a gas installation. Our proposed investment is nowhere to be seen, though, as it is a share in a gas pipeline network on the seabed.
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What’s on the menu?
As CIO of the Wasserdicht Pension Funds in the Netherlands, I have quite a bit to do with our fund’s boards and committees. I am on the management board of what we now call the ‘investment bureau’ and in that role I have to sit in on many trustee board meetings as an observer and answer questions.
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The solutions business
‘We’re in the solutions business!’ These were the words I was greeted with at the Worldwide Institutional Investing Conference inLondon recently. A fiduciary manager was presenting his vision for pension funds, and all kinds of jargon were thrown out – integral fiduciary management, partial mandate outsourcing, delegated CIOs and segregated diversified growth fund mandates.
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They want our money
In the Netherlands, our politicians want our money. They’ve got some of it already, in the form of our government bond holdings, and now they want some more.
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Diary of an Investor: It’s all about feeling in control
Our friends at PensionKøbenhavn have been visiting us here in Amsterdam. Last year, our two boards signed a mutual co-operation agreement with our Danish counterparts to start investment joint ventures. More informally, we both hope that we will also benefit from regular sharing of investment knowledge and experiences.
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A day to explain Dutch ambitions
This year we held the annual global strategy meeting of the Wasserdicht Pension Funds in the Netherlands. As this year’s organiser, I suggested a pleasant country house hotel near Hilversum.
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Diary of an Investor: Cold weather, great pay
February is not the time to visit Toronto. Stepping outside the airport I am reminded how seriously cold it gets in Canada. Winters are mostly pretty mild in the Netherlands so we don’t get to skate on frozen canals like in the Old Master paintings.
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Diary of an Investor: Early retirement? No thanks!
One day during our Christmas break, my wife was horrified to read in the daily paper that retirement ages are going up. Jeanette is a French national, even though she has lived most of her life outside of France. ‘There won’t be enough jobs for the young people and the elderly will be forced to work until they drop,’ she said.
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Diary of an Investor: A tale of two funding ratios
Just before Christmas I met my friend Ronald, who is CEO of the pension fund for forklift truck drivers. We meet for a beer one evening after work in our regular haunt in Utrecht. As usual, Ronald is not a happy man, and as usual, it comes down to numbers.
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Diary of an Investor: A tale of two cities
Last week we visited the offices of two asset managers for finals for a European equities mandate. The experiences were instructive.
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Diary of an Investor: Rear-view mirror
A couple of weeks ago I made my way to Amsterdam’s Beurs van Beurlage for a festive evening, the annual dinner of the Dutch Committee of Institutional Investors. It’s always a good occasion to catch up with old friends, even if you’d rather give some of the guests a wide berth.
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Diary of an Investor: Feed the world
It is early September and there’s a chill in the air but the sun is shining. It seems that summer has come late in the Netherlands.
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Diary of an Investor: Dog days
It is the end of August. Holidays are a distant memory, the leaves are wilting on the trees and the children are going back to school. The euro crisis isn’t getting any worse and markets have even rallied. Welcome to the dog days of summer.
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Diary of an Investor: Back to the future
A few weeks ago I phoned an old colleague of mine from years back. Jean-Pierre is from Paris.
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Diary of an Investor: We all agree… but
Everyone agrees about the problems. And everyone agrees that institutional investors need diversified, long-term, risk-managed portfolios to help them meet their liabilities. At least, that is what I concluded after I attended the latest Worldwide Institutional Investing Conference in London last month.
