Investment – Page 12
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Italian, global and poised for growth
In asset management, three years can be a short or a long time, depending on many factors, including market conditions. To some asset management executives, the second half of the 2010s perhaps felt like an endless slog, due to the intense competition for market share and outperformance within the seemingly never-ending bull market. The first two years of the new decade have certainly elapsed more quickly, thanks to the historical significance of the events that have occurred.
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FeaturesEuro peripheral spreads
Just over a decade ago, Mario Draghi, then President of the ECB, gave a speech in which he uttered the famous words: “.…the European Central Bank [ECB] is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro”, a phrase often credited with hauling Europe out of the depths of its sovereign debt crisis.
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FeaturesCommodities show their value
The few pension schemes with an investment in commodities benefitted from this allocation in recent months. Prices in this asset class rose as the pandemic and war in Ukraine pushed up the cost of fossil fuels and re-ignited inflation while both equity and bond markets faltered.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: Are defensive strategies delivering?
Introducing ‘defensiveness’ to equity portfolios can take many forms. At the most explicit end of the spectrum, we can consider dialling down market exposure using derivative-based equity overlays – whether these are static protection programmes or more complex dynamically managed strategies which could even include some implicit volatility trading. At the more implicit end, promising reduced ‘downside capture’, we find a wide array of defensive long-only equity strategies.
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FeaturesQontigo Riskwatch - September 2022
*Data as of 29 July 2022. Forecast risk estimate for each index measured by the respective US, World and Emerging Markets Qontigo model variants
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Features
IPE Quest Expectations Indicator - September 2022
The war in Ukraine is characterised by a build-up for the battle for Kherson. The result of that campaign is likely to have great political influence on both sides. Neither is capable of a surprise win, but time works against Russia. In the US, Trump’s legal troubles are serious and mounting, but any Republican successor may be even more destructive. The EU is running against time to prepare for winter. Both optimists and pessimists are over-estimating the ability of technicians to predict the future. Russia has lost the EU as a primary customer for its oil and gas. It must make up for higher distribution costs by offering significant discounts.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: solving the Russian share ban
Index investors inherently choose to follow the market through exchange-traded and index funds, but the recent prohibition on trading Russian stocks and their removal from global benchmarks has created something of a conundrum.
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Jose Minaya, Nuveen
Asset managers with a yield-hungry pension investor as a parent nowadays usually have to diversify their footprint into private markets, often by acquisitions in one form or another.
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FeaturesA flawed EU crypto regulatory framework
The EU will soon have a specific regulatory framework for crypto currencies and markets. Under proposals soon to be adopted, only crypto coins authorised in the EU will be allowed to be offered to investors. But crypto assets and exchanges will have a very light supervisory regime, much less than what is in place for financial instruments and exchanges. This raises the question about the rationale for distinct rules. This question is even more acute in the context of the big decline in the crypto markets over the past weeks.
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Features‘Painful’ private equity fees are hard to avoid
The Netherlands’ €551bn ($576bn) civil service scheme ABP paid a record €2.8bn in performance fees to private equity managers in 2021, prompting the fund’s president Harmen van Wijnen to announce an external investigation to assess ABP’s rising asset management costs. The €277.5bn healthcare scheme PFZW paid €1.26bn in performance fees to private equity last year, accounting for two thirds of total asset management costs.
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FeaturesAsset owners need to find the best stock pickers
For pension funds, an asset manager search is a high-stakes exercise. Get it wrong and the scheme could be saddled with an underperforming manager for an extended period of time, dragging down returns and potentially impacting member outcomes.
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FeaturesCustodians will be key as investors move into digital assets
Digital assets may seem to be the latest investment trend, but institutions are taking their time in embracing them. Moving interest to the next level will require not only greater regulation but also a solid network of custodians to provide the required security and protection.
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FeaturesQontigo Riskwatch - July/August 2022
* Data as of 31 May 2022. Forecast risk estimate for each index measured by the respective US, World and Emerging Markets Qontigo model variants
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InterviewsStrategically speaking interview: Edwin Conway, BlackRock Alternative Investors
Many asset owners focus on the return streams available from private markets investments and the diversification effect of private equity, debt or any of the other flavours available in this sector of the market.
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FeaturesAhead of the curve: tie executive pay to climate targets
AllianzGI and Cevian Capital take very different approaches to how we manage equity portfolios, but we are both long-term and active owners of companies. Following a series of conversations about how to best implement ESG criteria in our portfolios, we have found a common perspective.
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FeaturesEmissions reporting: taking stock of indirect emissions in Scope 3
Disclosure proposals by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in March could guide the regulatory searchlight beyond companies’ direct and indirect C02 emissions (Scope 1 and 2) and towards upstream and downstream (Scope 3) emissions.
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FeaturesYen’s swift dive surprises market
For several decades, the Japanese yen has not been in the limelight too often. However, earlier this year it became headline news as the currency began to depreciate rapidly against the US dollar. Although investors were not overly surprised that the yen would weaken, the speed of its decline was certainly startling. Over the course of about 15 months, between the start of 2021 to early April 2022, the yen has lost about 25% of its value against the dollar, with nearly half the move occurring in that final month.
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FeaturesUK venture: new kids on the block
Google the venture firm 2150 and you won’t find an investment strategy but a manifesto.
