All Features articles – Page 398
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Features
Now for the classification wars
As globalisation shifts the investment focus onto industrial sectors and away from geographical regions, so index providers have been sharpening up the way they define those sectors. Starting this year, Standard & Poor’s is using the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) as the sole system for all its indices worldwide. ...
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Features
New market set for consolidation
Poland’s centre-left government was returned to power last autumn by a population disgruntled with rising unemployment, deteriorating public finances and a rapidly decelerating economy. The one undoubted success of the outgoing government was pension reform, which in 1999 replaced an unsustainable defined benefits system with a three-pillar system partly funded ...
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Features
Puzzling over the data
There’s still caution in the markets, despite positive economic data being circulated at the moment. “We’re basically waiting to see what direction this year is going to take,” says Catherine Reilly, an economist at Conventum Securities in Helsinki. She says that whilst she believes the markets have bottomed out, investors ...
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Features
DB to DC in record time
The Polish pension reforms of 1999 rank as one of the fastest implementations of a switch from defined benefit to defined contributions schemes. Marek Gora, professor at the Warsaw School of Economics and co-designer of the programme, started work on the scheme in late 1996, producing the blueprint in early ...
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Features
Styles debate is now over
Even as the academic debate mumbles forward and current research diligently examines how styles might best be theoretically defined and where, and how, they might be relevant, recent equity returns and vivid investor experiences have already spoken very clearly. From 1997 to 2000, value underperformed and growth companies soared. Also, ...
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Features
Funds seek fewer investment limits
Like many other Polish financial reforms, the private pensions system was designed to boost the local capital markets. OFEs operate under a range of investment caps – except in the case of state treasuries where investment is unlimited – including a 40% limit on publicly traded Polish equities, 10% in ...
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Features
Laying the foundations
At the end of last year, an era in Austria pensions came to end, as Helmut Kapl retired as head of the APK-Pensionskasse group he had done so much to build up. But, he is not going quietly into the twilight of retirement. He has a number of irons in ...
