All Features articles – Page 363
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Features
Support for launch of new wide-ranging pension pac
The judges said that the establishment of the TotalFinaElf fund must have been an achievement in itself and praised its use of “good tools and periodicity in the communication process”. The staff at TotalFinaElf’s new retirement savings and pension fund department were naturally delighted to learn they had won the ...
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Features
Taking the luck out of pooling
The major employee benefits networks are reporting their busiest periods for new business for some time. The existing total market of around 2,200 pools is likely to expand by 8% this year and there is more in the pipeline. This change in fortunes is not completely accidental. Behind the numbers ...
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Features
MetallRente's well-forged plan
MetallRente, the joint venture between the metal employers’ association (Gesamtmetall) and the metalworkers’ union (IG Metall) has been heralded as one of the most innovative occupational pension funds to come out of the Riester pension reforms. At the beginning of September the organisation had more than 500 companies under contract ...
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Features
Norway's place for money
The institutional market in Norway is a notoriously difficult market for asset managers to enter. There are three broad reasons for this. The first is that the is market controlled by a handful of large players. The second is that the pension fund business is too fragmented to be lucrative ...
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Features
Search for safer processes
Although investment managers and pension funds previously largely ignored derivatives, recent events in the market are causing them to look at them again. Futures, options and swaps can provide useful instruments to either gain or hedge exposures to help meet performance targets or to manage risks. But derivatives can be ...
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Features
Variety of strategies
The HSBC Asian Equity Fund under HSBC’s SICAV Global Investment Fund series currently has $140m under management, with its Asia Equity OEIC counterpart running £40m. The month of October saw the fund return positive results of 5.47% after a fairly negative year, with the fund’s year-to-date returns currently sitting at ...
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Features
Outsourcing of e60bn mooted
Concerns about the medium term solvency of the Spanish social security system have been actively discussed not only in Spain but also in Brussels. At the end of last year the European Commission said that the Spanish government was not providing enough detailed information regarding the long term sustainability of ...
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Features
Value added alternatives to index tracking
As large company growth stocks surged in the late nineties, institutional investors in the US, UK and elsewhere became increasingly disenchanted with traditional active investment managers. This was especially so with those espousing a value style of investing, because they were generally underweighted in these stocks and so underperformed the ...
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Features
Resilient in adversity
Passive management has had its fair share of knockers in the last few months. Consider the recent assertion by Paul Woolley, chairman of fund manager GMO Woolley, that passive investment may be popular, but that it is undermining equity returns and promoting market bubbles and implosions. Woolley argued that by ...
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Features
Nightmare on ALM street
American defined benefit (DB) pension funds may become the next nightmare for US corporations. David Blitzer, chairman of Standard & Poor’s index committee, predicts that pension contributions will replace stock options as the big corporate accounting issue next year. The almost three year severe stock market downturn has deeply damaged ...
