All articles by Dickon Reid – Page 30
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Features
Germany still an elusive target
Germany’s decision to pass it long overdue pensions reform will prove a real boon to the consultants market and Mercers’ Jacques Goulet believes the German market will draw a lot of attention thanks to the changes. Historically companies with an emphasis on actuarial services like Heissman and Heubeck market have ...
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Features
International operators gear up
Across Europe consultants have fared very differently in the past year. Common to almost every country are many similar themes- the shift from DB to DC, companies appreciating the potential risks of their schemes, the question of how to react to falling stock markets and dwindling state provision- and above ...
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News
Campaign to lobby pension funds on workers rights
GLOBAL - War on Want, the anti poverty charity, is launching a campaign on Monday urging pension contributors and trustees to lobby companies they invest in to respect workers’ rights....
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Features
Myners opens Pandora's box
When Paul Myners allocated just a couple of pages to the issue of brokerage commissions in his recent report into the UK institutional market, he cannot have anticipated the hornets’ nest he was to disturb. Although he focused on commissions, it has brought the issue of trading costs as a ...
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Features
Collaborative effort
As many of the Netherlands’ Industry-wide pension funds split their administrative and investment management departments, there’s a hub in Rijswijk where exactly the opposite is underway. Five company schemes and one Industry-wide pension fund, who last year announced they were launching a cooperative, have taken delivery of the keys to ...
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Features
Z score dissenters
Jan Baars and his employer, the PGGM pension fund, have been among the fiercest critics of the Z scores. In a series of articles in the Dutch press, PGGM has at times sounded almost apocalyptic, warning that the Industry-wide fund in the Netherlands is doomed. Complaints levelled against the Z ...
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Features
Opting out: illusion or reality
April the first next year sees the Netherlands’ Z scores reach their fifth birthday and members of industry-wide funds have the option of dropping out and seeking investment management and pensions administration elsewhere if their scheme fails to meet the prescribed level. The number of funds that are likely to ...
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Features
Measuring implementation shortfall
An unmanaged or poorly managed portfolio transition can at its worst combine opportunity costs, market impact and commissions to produce breathtaking costs. You needn’t look far for horror stories. A recent article in the US quoted the transaction cost company Plexus as saying one of the transitions it monitored has ...
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Features
Making introductions
Until recently placing money with a hedge fund manager was predominantly done through small independent companies offering what is known as capital raising or contract marketing. In practice hedge funds lacking the resources to fund their own sales teams employ someone independent. Typically that someone might be Arpad Busson running ...
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Features
Outperformance there for the taking
The data below, supplied by Financial Risk Management, the hedge fund specialist, tracks the performance of every type of hedge fund conceivable. The figures on the opposite page are FRM estimates of how the industry has grown in the past seven years and more specifically, which of the four classes ...
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Features
It's not all one-way traffic
Key to the issue of outsourcing is whether to manage assets in-house or to appoint a third party investment manager. According to George Urquhart of the WM Company, internal managers are finding themselves under pressure from tight human resource budgets while trustees and plan sponsors are under pressure from consultants ...
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Features
US managers defiant
The determination of companies affected by the attacks on the World Trade Centre to get back to business is something to behold. Few following events in America can have missed Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive Howard Lutnick’s emotional interview on ABC news. Over 400 companies were housed in the two towers, ...
