All Features articles – Page 259
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Features
Carried away with alpha
Although enhanced indexing is a strategy for generating limited levels of outperformance, portable alpha is another technique for adding value, and one which has the huge potential advantage in that it can be used to boost returns in an unconnected part of the portfolio. Portable alpha is generated using ...
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Features
JP Morgan walks away from FRR mandate
JP Morgan Investment Management, one of the fund managers lined up by the e19.2bn French reserve fund for stand-by mandates, has withdrawn, thereby giving up the chance to run Euro-zone large-cap and US mid-cap equities. The fund, the Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), said it would not re-award ...
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Features
Funds: bouncing back
Alarm bells about the impending pension crisis seem to have faded away. US corporate and public pension funds have achieved good returns in 2004. If assets returns continue to perform in line with historical norms, and interest rates return to more normal levels, the funding pressures should ease, according to ...
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Features
Best and worst of both worlds?
For all the benefits enhanced indexing may offer – close index tracking with vital extra points of performance – the depth of its acceptance varies from country to country within Europe. Frits Bosch, director of Netherlands consultancy Bureau Bosch, says enhanced indexing is very popular among pension funds in his ...
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Features
Merger brings sadness at Watsons
Partners at UK-based consulting firm Watson Wyatt LLP are sad over its plans to merge with its US affiliate, says managing partner Babloo Ramamurthy. Washington-based Watson Wyatt & Co said in January it would buy the Reigate firm for $451m(E338m) in cash and stock. “Many partners are experiencing sadness about ...
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Features
Great hope of British pensions
It’s very difficult to find anybody to say a bad thing about Adair Turner. The former head of the industry group the Confederation of British Industry, who now heads the UK’s Pension Commission, has a lot of fans. Turner has a blue-chip background in public policy, academia and the financial ...
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Features
Commodities 'bull market'
The only place where there is currently a pure bull market is in commodities, investment guru Jim Rogers told the SuperHedge conference in Frankfurt last month. Allaying investor fears that commodities are dangerous, the author of bestselling books ‘Hot Commodities’ and ‘Adventure Capitalist’ pointed out that economic history shows there ...
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Features
Business pioneers
There was no fanfare to announce the birth of commission recapture story in the US. It goes back to 1986, to two almost platitudinous observations: A Department of Labor pensions bulletin which commented that broker commissions are an asset of the pension plan and that the administrator of the plan ...
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Features
Cleaning up with enhanced
Among the UK pension funds that moved into enhanced index equities last year was the £550m (e792m) fund belonging to household cleaning products company Reckitt Benckiser UK. The fund awarded State Street Global Advisors a £50m enhanced indexing equity mandate. The fund’s manager Kevin O’Berg said State Street was chosen ...
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Features
Steering towards convertibles
Back at the start of this decade, convertibles were one of the darlings of the capital markets, producing equity-like returns (double-digit in those days) with considerably less risk. Conventional/traditional fund managers and the convertible arbitrage hedge funds, both enjoyed excellent performance. The happy times are gone and returns in recent ...
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Features
Coping with era of low returns
IPE asked three pension funds in three countries – in Finland, Ireland and Slovenia – the same question: ‘How are you meeting the challenge of what looks like a more-than-temporary low in long-term interest rates?’ Here are their answers: Jari Eskelinen is head of fixed income at Ilmarinen, Finland’s ...
