In Depth – Page 40
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Features
Inflated expectations
Investors often assume that inflation protection comes as standard with infrastructure investments. Vivian Nicoli warns that it depends on a number of variables and may come at the price of lower expected nominal returns
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Features
Investing in a slow-growth world
Demographic trends probably mean slower economic growth in the developed world. Katherine Davidson argues that a thorough understanding of demographics will be essential for generating alpha in this environment
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Features
Fuelling risk
Investors need to consider the extent to which their portfolios are exposed to rising climate-change risk, writes Mark Nicholls
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Features
Rates of change
Carolyn Tavares argues that the roller-coaster start to 2014, with its disconnect between economic indicators and bond yields, makes the case for holding to strategic, funding level-based de-risking programmes
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Interviews
An artisan with solutions
Where one still finds asset managers attached to banks, the former tend to be junior partners. Not so at William Blair, whose founder always had an ambition both to finance and invest in small growth companies from day one in 1935.
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Interviews
Performance built on research
Unigestion’s investment principles tell us that it is “not swayed by short-term trends or techniques which are in vogue”. At first glance that might seem a bit rich, considering its reputation for minimum-variance equities – about as “in vogue” as it gets.
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Features
Rates of change
A multi-polar growth and monetary landscape will require a less constrained approach to fixed income, argues Stephen Cohen. Right now emerging markets look like an attractive prospect
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Special Report
Near the cliff edge
Elisabeth Jeffries asks whether investors will be discouraged by an end to specific renewables targets for EU member states
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Interviews
Global expectations
“What makes businesses interesting is how they adapt to a global changing world,” declares John Calamos, founder, chairman, CEO and co-CIO of Calamos Investments. Having set up the firm in 1977, listed it on Nasdaq in 2004 and reached an AUM peak of $49bn (€36bn) in 2007, he is now overseeing a transformation that he intends will take it on a journey from a predominantly US focussed firm to a global fund management company.
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Features
Favour Europe and the euro
Lorenzo Naranjo and Carmen Stefanescu argue that balance of payments and current accounts suggest Europe is strengthening while China weakens
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Interviews
Cautious, Swiss and international
As an institutional manager and provider of institutional-type investment management services to private banks, including within its own group, Pictet Asset Management (PAM) clearly stands apart from the private banking fraternity.
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Features
Rising sun or false dawn?
Daniel Ben-Ami looks back on a year of ‘Abenomics’, and finds optimism in the early hours of a new day for Japan’s economy and markets
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Features
A sovereign story: the Argentine experience
Rani Mina and Mark Stefanini argue that precedents set by the Argentine default experience could well be applied to future sovereign defaults including in the euro-zone
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Interviews
Building bridges
They do not come any more Australian than AMP Capital. Its parent company started life as a mutual insurer in Sydney in 1849, and is today headquartered in the city’s first skyscraper, which it financed, and which stands on the site of AMP co-founder and pastoralist Thomas Mort’s wool store. Its commanding views of the famous harbour are the backdrop to board and client meetings.
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Features
Cutting a tranche of yield
The current levels of default risk and the ability to tailor exposures to portfolio requirements make CLOs and CDOs potentially attractive for pension funds, writes Geoffrey Randells
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Features
The US Treasury’s New Year gift
The US Treasury brings to market its first new product in nearly 20 years. Stephanie Schwartz reports
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Features
From recycle to growth cycle
Brian Bollen asks whether a pick-up in corporate and economic activity can awake the loan market from a torpor of refinancing
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Features
Illiquid but not non-transparent
Cyril Demaria argues that private equity illiquidity need not prevent the creation of a model for vintage return prediction that can reduce the prudential capital costs of the asset class
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Interviews
Not corporate governance police
Poor governance may have been catapulted into the headlines in recent years, but to-date few asset managers in Europe have been trying to make money through activist strategies. One that does, as part of its range of products, is London’s RWC. In 2013, RWC’s assets under management grew from $5bn (€3.7bn) to $7.5bn, which its CEO Dan Mannix attributes to “a normalisation of opportunities within the equity markets” and a general improvement in investor sentiment.
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Interviews
Operating in the market shadows
Harald Espedal has a party to get to. It is October 2013 and he is in London to celebrate Skagen Funds’ twentieth birthday with the firm’s growing UK team and a host of colleagues from Stavanger in Norway.
