All Investment Briefing articles – Page 6
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FeaturesAsset management faces systemic risk questions
When will the next financial crisis hit? Over 80% of respondents among a sample of 500 institutional investors surveyed by Natixis Investment Managers expect a crisis to take place within the next five years.
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FeaturesWhen safe haven assets aren’t safe
In the current environment, investors look set to lose money on European government bonds – a quintessential safe-haven asset
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FeaturesOngoing UCITS fees are falling
UCITS are an example of EU financial innovation and a global success story. With €10.1trn in total net assets, UCITS help global investors save for financial goals, including retirement, education, and housing.
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FeaturesBriefing: Peer-to-peer securities lending
The words scale, operational efficiency and lower cost feature regularly in the State Street discussion of its new peer-to-peer securities lending product. Direct Access Lending enables direct, principal loans between its lending clients and its borrowing clients.
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FeaturesEmerging market debt: Argentina makes investors cry
Who needs Pennywise the terrifying clown when one has Argentine bonds in their investment portfolios?
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FeaturesBriefing: There is still room for growth
Equity investors putting faith in growth stocks – stocks that are priced expensively relative to fundamentals because they are expected to grow fast – received a shock in early September when they sold off sharply.
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FeaturesBriefing: Alternatives to large-cap buyouts
Large buyout funds are a staple ingredient in many institutional pension funds’ private-equity portfolios. Focusing on more diversified private-market strategies could be a better way to achieve return objectives
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FeaturesBriefing: Draghi’s parting gift on ECB stance
If anyone in Europe was left in any doubt on 11 September about the dovishness of the European Central Bank (ECB) under Mario Draghi’s leadership, by close of business on the next day their doubts were surely dispelled. On that day the outgoing president of the ECB unleashed a bout of monetary easing, in an attempt to boost euro-zone inflation from 1% to its target of “below, but close to, 2% over the medium term”.
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FeaturesBriefing: US makes rapid turnaround
Father Christmas delivered a sack of coal to equity markets last Christmas Eve, with the S&P 500 index losing 1.8%, following a three-day slide. Forecasters had previously been expecting two or three rate hikes in December, as Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell steered that discussion. He had mistakenly assumed that the economy had not yet reached a normal, neutral level but it already had, forcing him to backtrack.
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FeaturesBriefing: Deep tensions threaten EU vision
This is not a commentary on the UK within or without Europe. Brexit has been a compelling distraction but it is one macroeconomic strand in a complex world. The overwhelming coverage has also moved attention away from key internal tensions within the European project.
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FeaturesBriefing: Coping with lower for much longer
German institutional investors have shifted their asset allocation due to low bond yields
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FeaturesGerman Spezialfonds show modest asset growth
Germany’s Spezialfonds market showed modest positive growth in 2018 in the face of challenging market conditions, with total assets approaching €1.5trn.
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Features
Briefing: Give credit to CDS indices
DB pension funds could benefit from synthetic credit exposures provided by credit default swap indices
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FeaturesBriefing: The cliff-hanger of European banks
It has been a bad decade for European financials, with share prices still a fraction of their pre-crisis highs
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FeaturesBriefing: Sri Lanka after the bombings
The tragic Easter Sunday bombings have devastated tourism, a key plank of the economy
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FeaturesIPOs: Unicorn hunting
“Public interest in IPOs hasn’t been this high since the dot-com era of the late 1990s,” say analysts at UBS. Such popularity is stoking fears of a bubble in unicorns – privately-financed start-ups valued at over $1bn (€900m) taking listings.
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FeaturesLiquidity: Bad timing
Pension funds lose billions annually in badly timed trades in the capital markets
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Features
Briefing: Guidance for valuation of ILS
Valuation has always been an important, albeit thorny, component in assessing insurance-linked securities (ILS) but the higher-than-expected losses in 2017 and 2018 made the number crunching even trickier. The recently published set of guidelines from the Standard Board of Alternative Investments (SBAI) is designed to improve the process but investors should always be aware of the risks attached to this asset class.
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FeaturesBriefing: It is all downhill from here
Six months ago, markets were rediscovering volatility, sentiment was wavering and there were growing fears that we had reached the end of a decade-long bull market for most assets. There were several reasons, such as worries over indicators, global trade tensions and the sustainability of corporate earnings growth, but one of the key ones was the relentless raising of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve.
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FeaturesBriefing: Shining a light on active ETFs
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have grown into a $5trn (€4.4trn) global industry by focusing on a few key selling points – low costs, liquidity, easy diversification and transparency.
