All Features articles – Page 11
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FeaturesMarket overview: German institutional investors manage uncertainty
At mid-year 2022, the volume of Spezialfonds – the German vehicle for professional investors – administered on Universal Investment’s platform was €498bn, a rise of around 5% year on year. On a six-month basis, however, and compared with the end of the booming stock year 2021, asset volumes were down around 3%.
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FeaturesPension funds continue their focus on ESG social issues
Before the year is over, European policymakers are expected to announce their decision to shelve plans for a social taxonomy.
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FeaturesIASB's management commentary project faces identity crisis
Any regular follower of the International Accounting Standards Board is probably familiar with a particular recurring nightmare. It starts with good intentions but spirals into shifting project goals, missed targets, and unquantifiable hours of wasted time. Perhaps you awoke during July to find yourself observing the board’s July discussion of its management commentary project.
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FeaturesIPE Quest Expectations Indicator: monthly commentary
Political risk has decreased. An attack in the north-east of Ukraine took the Russian army by surprise but did not cause collateral damage in Russia. Russians’ resistance to the war is mounting but far from a critical level. It looks like the EU will survive the winter without major energy disruption and caps on energy prices are falling into place.
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FeaturesLGIM’s Michelle Scrimgeour: ambitions for growth
Michelle Scrimgeour and her executive team set out their strategic growth priorities in November 2020, a little more than a year after she had taken over as CEO of Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM). They agreed to grow the business by focusing on existing strengths: to modernise, diversify and to internationalise.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Clearing up the ‘scaling’ confusion in carbon intensity
Today, a company’s carbon intensity is typically measured in one of two ways – scaling by revenue, or by EVIC (enterprise value including cash). The choice an investor makes can lead to differences in portfolio characteristics.
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FeaturesFixed income, rates & currency: Central banks act tough
This year’s Jackson Hole Symposium, an annual high-level event sponsored by the Reserve Bank of Kansas, yielded relatively little policy news. But the fighting talk from the US Federal Reserve and others was striking. Fed chair Jerome Powell’s speech was markedly more hawkish than expected, while Isabel Schnabel, board member of the European Central Bank, referred to the need for central banks to act ‘forcefully’ because “both the likelihood and the cost of current high inflation becoming entrenched in expectations are uncomfortably high”.
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FeaturesInternational Sustainability Accounting Standards Board: An insider view
Technical director Ravi Abeywardana highlights the challenges faced by the newly minted International Sustainability Standards Board and its staff
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FeaturesQontigo Riskwatch - October 2022
*Data as of 31 August 2022. Forecast risk estimate for each index measured by the respective US, World and Emerging Markets Qontigo model variants
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FeaturesEuro peripheral spreads
Just over a decade ago, Mario Draghi, then President of the ECB, gave a speech in which he uttered the famous words: “.…the European Central Bank [ECB] is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro”, a phrase often credited with hauling Europe out of the depths of its sovereign debt crisis.
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FeaturesResearch: The democratising of impact investing
Amin Rajan and Sebastian Schiele find investors are opting for more social-related investing
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FeaturesFixed income, rates & currency: defying historical norms
Another US jobs report comes in significantly above consensus. Its across-the-board strength, upward revisions to previous reports, and an unemployment rate at the lowest level since 1963, may indicate that the economy is not quite as near recession as previously surmised. And with inflation still rising, albeit slightly less fast than expected, the outlook remains cloudy.
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FeaturesCommodities show their value
The few pension schemes with an investment in commodities benefitted from this allocation in recent months. Prices in this asset class rose as the pandemic and war in Ukraine pushed up the cost of fossil fuels and re-ignited inflation while both equity and bond markets faltered.
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FeaturesCEE private equity: in search of capital
War in Ukraine is just one factor deterring investment in private equity and growth capital in Central and Eastern Europe
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FeaturesWe need better climate models to manage global warming impacts
Travelling back to the UK from Sri Lanka in July, I experienced a 10-degree temperature rise with the UK hitting over 40°C. While some people may argue that such extreme temperatures in the UK could just be a statistical anomaly, climate scientists such as Tim Palmer, Royal Society research professor in climate physics at Oxford University, who I spoke to at length on the subject, have no doubt that global mean temperatures are rising as a result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Are defensive strategies delivering?
Introducing ‘defensiveness’ to equity portfolios can take many forms. At the most explicit end of the spectrum, we can consider dialling down market exposure using derivative-based equity overlays – whether these are static protection programmes or more complex dynamically managed strategies which could even include some implicit volatility trading. At the more implicit end, promising reduced ‘downside capture’, we find a wide array of defensive long-only equity strategies.
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FeaturesAccounting: Packed agenda as ISSB takes shape
ISSB board aims to finalise its first two sustainability standards by the end of the year A consultation on the ISSB’s work priorities is planned for later this year The role of materiality in sustainability reporting remains a hotly debated topic
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FeaturesQontigo Riskwatch - September 2022
*Data as of 29 July 2022. Forecast risk estimate for each index measured by the respective US, World and Emerging Markets Qontigo model variants
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