All Features articles – Page 125
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Features
Multi-asset inflation funds
There are several multi-asset funds mandated to match or beat inflation. Martin Steward asks whether they are anything more than re-packaged absolute return products
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Features
How do you hedge?
This month’s Off The Record survey looks at pension fund liability hedging. Some 20% of funds responding to the survey had a current level of hedging relative to liabilities of over 100%, the highest being 115%. Over 25% of respondents had a level of 50-99%, while 29% gave their level ...
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Features
EC’s pensions paper aims ‘unclear’
Pensions are on the European Commission’s radar again, and three divisions have been given the task of preparing a Green Paper on the creation of an EU framework for pensions by the middle of this year. Pension fund bodies and consultants say they welcome the move to talk about encouraging pensions savings. But there is apprehension about the possible content and concerns about the Commission’s aims, in part because there appears to be a degree of urgency to the process.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Risk averse
So good-bye to the new normal (not even adieu) and hello again to old normal. Well, sort of. Marketing seems to be back on the agenda for all those asset managers with such wonderful alpha-producing track records, and of course for all the beta players too. But we are taking beta blockers here at Wasserdicht Pensioenfonds – it’s the A-class performance we want. Except in Germany.
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Features
The emergency room
Fat-tailed models need to adapt well in normal market conditions and differentiate between asset classes. Boryana Racheva-Iotova compares fat-tailed models with GARCH based on stable Paretian distributions, t-distributions and extreme value theory
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Features
Changes ahead for Dutch pensions
Dutch pension fund governance and investment risk strategies have rarely faced such tough scrutiny. Following the publication of the Frijns and Goudswaard Committees’ reports, as well as evidence of closer oversight on the part of the supervisor, De Nederlansche Bank (DNB), a number of initiatives and recommendations are expected to ...
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Features
Pension fund returns bounce back in 2009
Improvements in global markets from March 2009 resulted in the majority of European pension funds posting double-digit investment returns by the end of the year.
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Features
Finland mulls reforms
The Finnish government and labour market organisations are evaluating reform proposals made by two working groups aiming to identify ways of increasing working life and raising the retirement age. The working groups were set up after the agreement between social partners and the government in March 2009 to increase the ...
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Features
Benchmark and save
Gail Moss finds out how pension funds can use benchmarking to reduce their operating costs
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Features
Berkshire: Straight talker
The UK’s Royal County of Berkshire pension fund has slashed long-only equities and hedged its longevity risk. The manager of the fund, Nick Greenwood, told Brendan Maton about his strategy
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Features
Bucking the trends
Martin Steward examines the big claims that are made for managed futures’ non-correlation with traditional assets, other hedge funds and even each other
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Features
Nod for investment consultants
This month’s Off The Record survey focuses on pension funds’ use of investment consultants and their satisfaction with the services provided. Some 62% of funds said they used investment consultants on a retainer basis, while 38% did so on an occasional or project basis.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Crikey!
“Oh dear, whoops and crikey”, are expressions used by the British to describe feelings when facing unusual situations. Well, I use them because we are being visited by Central Bank supervisor. These visits must evoke similar reactions from my peers in other European countries. Yet in Holland, no matter how the coverage ratio looks, we know we are all about to be told off.
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FeaturesWhen lightning strikes twice
Pension funds face a difficult challenge in coping with market volatility and modelling risk. Lisa Goldberg describes some of the available options in statistical analysis
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Features
Presentation revisited
The most controverisal aspect of the IASB’s shake-up of financial statement presentation is the move to a so-called single statement of comprehensive income.
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Features
Information revolution
This month’s Off The Record survey asked pension funds in what ways they communicate with their members or participants. Over a third (38%) of respondents felt that postal correspondence was still the most important form of communication. Some 26.5% found their website to be the most important method, while only ...
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Features
Pensions claw back returns in 2009
European pension funds performed significantly better in 2009 as continued market rallies in the second half of the year allowed schemes to post double-digit returns. Schemes in the Netherlands reported improvements as pension fund cover ratios pulled back to an average 111% by the end of 2009, according to statistics ...
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Features
DC risk sharing and how to go about it
The investment losses suffered in the last two years of downturn have inspired new thinking – not least on how to improve the risk-return profile of defined contribution (DC) pension investing and how to secure cheap DC guarantees. Many of these ideas were discussed at a conference on DC risk-sharing in January hosted at The University of Exeter Business School. And they could be useful to the pension regimes of most countries, according to participants.
