All Features articles – Page 422
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Features
DC to drive fund business forward
One of the largest and more sophisticated fund management markets in the world, the strongly-equity oriented UK market, has been providing its highly developed pension fund industry with a broad a range on investment vehicles for a long time. Whether pension funds opt to invest in segregated accounts or choose ...
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Features
Slicing up the European cake
Northern Trust, the custodian with E1.9trn in assets at the close of last year, showed its larger competitors up in 2000 by winning E225bn in new business worldwide, E70bn of which originated from Europe. Significant wins last year include appointments from Akzo Nobel, both in the UK and the Netherlands, ...
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Features
Modest gains only on cards
The major valuation anomalies of the past few years – equities overpriced relative to bonds, TMT (technology-media-telecommunications) stocks overpriced relative to other stocks, and large-capitalisation stocks overpriced relative to small-capitalisation stocks – have been largely eliminated. Most equity and bond markets are now trading close to fair value, as are ...
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Features
Mefop chooses on performance
Make no mistake about it. The Italians are deadly serious about developing their pension funds, adopting the latest and best from outside, but only after a thorough and rigorous analysis as to what they need and how it can serve their needs. This message came through very clearly at the ...
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Features
Currency risk out of the closet
Many may not be familiar with the concept of a ‘currency benchmark’. It results from the explicit recognition of currency risk in a portfolio, and, for example, might be ‘World ex UK equities 100% hedged’. The ‘100% hedged’ is the key point here: the process of choosing benchmarks is in ...
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Features
Custodians join the rating game
The ratings game has finally caught up with the custodian sector of the investment community, with Paris- based Fitch-AMR ready to publish the results of its first contract. “The development of the methodology to rate custodians and trustees is one of the major areas we’ve progressed in during the last ...
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Features
Silent and deep at Merrills
The removal of RBS Trust Bank and Lloyds TSB Securities Services from the global custody equation – the first swallowed up by The Bank of New York, the other falling victim to a predictable post-merger realignment of priorities – left a London-shaped hole in the business that a number of ...
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Features
Dutch funds go scheme-specific route
The phenomenon of peer group comparison as a benchmark to judge an internal or external money manager is, although extremely common within pension funds in the UK, not used in the Netherlands. In Holland the use of scheme-specific benchmark is widespread. The basis for the strategic asset allocation is usually ...
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Features
A European stock exchange
A little over a year ago we were tempted by the prospect of a merger between the Deutsche Börse and the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Well, nothing became of the proposed iX but Euronext, the joint venture between the AEX (from Amsterdam), Brussels Exchanges and the Paris Bourse has gone ...
