All Features articles – Page 153
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Features
Cutting-edge strategies resolve risk/return dilemma
All pension funds have to balance risk and return, but for local government pension funds, there is also another balancing act involved – the ability to deal with political pressure.
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Features
Investment guidelines reflect members’ values
With socially responsible investing continuing to develop as an established part of the asset management industry, it is easy for pension funds to make token gestures towards the concept, without necessarily putting in place processes that can effect change.
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Features
Core/satellite approach keeps performance up
Since its launch in 1999, the Fonditel Red Básica pension fund has achieved remarkable returns on its investments, a record which has kept it permanently at the top of the performance rankings. For this consistency of performance, FRB has won the award for Best Spanish Pension Fund.
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Features
Open door policy redefines real estate
Investing in any kind of alternative requires care and skill. Real estate is a classic example. There are different ways you can get into this popular alternative and once in, running a property portfolio presents certain challenges – something Denmark’s professional services pension scheme, PKA, knows only to well, with ...
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Features
Mutual respect in selecting the best
Launched in 1993, Portugal’s small €94m BPI Valorização is unlike many of the other schemes represented at this year’s IPE Awards.
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Features
Back to basics review creates complex but manageable system
Constructing a successful portfolio will always require careful planning and a clear set of principles to ensure it develops effortlessly and efficiently. This is an ethos that Sweden’s €22.8bn AP3 scheme fully understands. With investment returns falling from 17.7% in 2005 to 9.5% in 2006, the state buffer fund began ...
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Features
Commodities results prompt measured reappraisal
For most passive commodities investors, 2006 was a disappointing year in performance terms. But instead of a knee-jerk response, reducing its exposure to this asset class, the reaction from Doctors Pension Fund Services was a calm reappraisal of its whole approach to this area.
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Features
An extra component to an LDI strategy
With assets around some €2.8bn under management, Dutch scheme PNO Media, which represents 30,000 members across the Netherlands’ media industry, may be small in comparison with some of its peers, such ABP and PGGM, but that doesn’t mean it is any less innovative or meticulous in its operations – as ...
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Features
Pooled vehicle brings new life to Baltic bond market
It is one thing to be aware that a specific market sector needs to be developed. It is quite another to recognise that opportunity and to grasp it with both hands. In helping to grow the corporate debt market in the Baltic countries, and for its innovative approach to its ...
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Features
Acclimatising to normal life
Alan Steele retired earlier this year as director of finance at the London Borough of Hounslow with oversight of the borough’s pension scheme, which has assets of £480m (€666m). He talks to George Coats about his career
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Features
Excellence across the board
This year’s IPE awards again sees a bumper crop of entries at an excellent standard.
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Features
Actors in search of a role
Investment consultants have yet to carve our much of a niche in the Spanish pensions market, George Coats finds
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Features
Bank paper takes hit after subprime crisis
Yield curve/durationAnother rate cut from the US Federal Reserve was announced in the midst of some very ugly reporting numbers from several of the leading US investment banks. In its accompanying statement after announcing the quarter point cut, the Fed made it very clear that this was to be the ...
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Features
One step ahead of the law
Switzerland’s €2bn ABB Pension Fund is no slave to regulation and even claims the way it interprets pensions law in the rich Alpine state has enhanced the way the regulations have evolved there.
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Features
All your eggs in one basket
The small but innovative €566m Bosch hybrid group pension scheme remains the only occupational pension fund in Germany to apply changes to accounting practices introduced in 2005 by the International Financial Reporting Standards board which affect the way companies view their pensions.
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Features
Taking on the alternatives
IPE asked three pension services – in Croatia, Sweden and the Netherlands – the same question: ‘What is your attitude to alternative investments?’ Here are their answers:
