All Features articles – Page 258
-
Features
A perplexing market
In 1853 a small fleet of five black US navy ships led by USS Powhatan and commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry, anchored at Tokyo Bay and opened up Japan to international trade after 250 years of isolation. A combination of diplomatic finesse backed up by gunboats had transformed the attitudes ...
-
Features
Waiting to take over
Finland’s biggest pension funds are using modern and sophisticated systems for tasks such as handling new complex investment instruments, risk analysis and the straight through processing of trades. The integration of systems for efficient cost-effective operations appears to be a common goal. However, there are some funds that take a ...
-
Features
Pay or prerequisite?
Two views of pensions have developed in Europe. One is that a pension, whether provided by government or private sector, is effectively deferred pay. In this view, members of defined benefit (DB) pension schemes exchange pay today for future pensions. In other words, people will accept wages at lower than ...
-
Features
A true pioneer
Pioneer Investments is the global asset manager that was created in 2000 when Italian banking group UniCredito acquired the US investment firm Pioneer Group and merged it with its own asset management company, EuroPlus Research and Management. The acquisition gave UniCredito’s asset management arm a global reach, since Pioneer brought ...
-
Features
Z-score's wider ramifications
The Dutch public debate has been dominated the last decade by the theme of the effectiveness of market forces. Applied to the pensions sector the debate has been about whether or not membership of an industry-wide pension fund should be compulsory. If the employer and employee representatives in a sector ...
-
Features
Revolution at the top
Europe’s largest pension fund, the mighty ABP has turned its approach to investment inside out. The equity portion of the E170bn portfolio that was 75% externally managed just three years ago, is now two-thirds internally managed. The 45% that was on an indexed basis has fallen to zero – the ...
-
Features
UK set to offer 50-year bonds
Pension funds will see an immediate benefit from the introduction of 50-year bonds by the UK government from this month. The ultra-long bonds are expected to help pension schemes better match their liabilities and help set the price of the synthetic products being expensively sold by investment banks. Gordon Brown, ...
-
Features
Testing times for private accounts
If people are free to choose, they will choose freedom. This political philosophy, which was strongly embraced by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, is now at the core of the Bush administration in every field, including economy. It is the very same principle that would justify a pension reform ...
-
Features
Alpha overlay: employing active management risk
In simplest terms, alpha overlay is the process of generating excess returns through active management, independent of an underlying asset class. Properly executed, alpha overlay leads to better investment results with no more risk than traditional investment management for the following reasons: q The total return of a portfolio equals ...
-
Features
Aiming to go paperless
Swiss pension funds see technology primarily as a way of improving the efficiency of their business. Document imaging systems are enabling some funds to become paperless operations, while others are installing systems that will improve automation, lower the costs of investing and provide quicker, more accurate and comprehensive information. For ...
-
Features
Aligning assets with liabilities
Investment managers have been quicker than government to respond to the liability matching needs of UK pension funds. Before the UK government had announced plans for 50-year bonds, two leading European fund managers had rolled out solutions of their own. Both solutions tackle the shortage of suitable pooled liability matching ...
-
Features
The great alpha hunt
Europe’s pension funds are still reluctant to talk about their strategies in terms of alpha and beta. But there is still a need for pension funds and other large investors to gather all the outperformance that they can. The terms ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ are used to name two investment management ...
