Investment – Page 48
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InterviewsNew birth for Neuberger
I first met Dik van Lomwel high up on a deserted floor of 25 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, almost exactly one year ago. The employees of Neuberger Berman, bought by Lehman Brothers in 2000, were the only people left, and the place had a melancholy air. “It’s a tragedy, what happened here,” he said. “Lehman was a genuinely nice place to work – how many firms on the Street had senior people who stuck around for so long? But now we have the opportunity to take that forward into the new firm.”
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Features
Untapped potential
Charlotte Adlung makes the case for Africa, warning that poor governance and infrastructure is the main stumbling block to investment
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Features
Multi-asset inflation funds
There are several multi-asset funds mandated to match or beat inflation. Martin Steward asks whether they are anything more than re-packaged absolute return products
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Interviews
The full toolbox
Think Lyxor Asset Management’s brand-defining products and the word ‘barbell’ comes to mind: on one end, Lyxor ETFs and other index products (the cheapest and most passive vehicles); at the other, the market-leading hedge fund managed account platform (the most expensive and active investment strategies).
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Interviews
Modelling talent – and tails
We all know that finding alpha is tough. But managing a portfolio of alpha sources is also trickier than it seems. Many assume that a hedge fund manager’s idiosyncratic risk has a stable relationship with his beta exposures (which is unsatisfactory); and that idiosyncratic risk is normally-distributed and, by definition, non-correlated with other idiosyncratic risks (which is potentially disastrous). Very few have made significant progress beyond these assumptions, but it should come as no surprise that one of those few is fund of hedge funds Caliburn Capital Partners – because building portfolios of alpha is its raison d’être.
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Features
Bucking the trends
Martin Steward examines the big claims that are made for managed futures’ non-correlation with traditional assets, other hedge funds and even each other
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InterviewsIn your style
If ‘manager of managers’ was once the way SEI chose to explain its European business, it has now embraced fiduciary management. Or as Patrick Disney, managing director of SEI’s EMEA institutional business, likes to put it: “When we started here, head office told us to sell what they called a ‘bundled outsourced retirement platform’, which I always thought was a bit of a mouthful. But essentially it was what we now call fiduciary management.”
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FeaturesEnter the global dimension
There is no rule that says emerging market securities are the only – or even the best – source of emerging market exposure. Martin Steward looks at access points closer to home
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Features
Distressed still not de-stressed
As in equity markets, Caroline Hay finds that the big bounce in distressed debt and leveraged loans since the lows of last winter raises as many questions as answers
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Interviews
A Hamburg asset
The phlegmatic Hamburgers are often compared with the British by dint of their conservative outlook and controlled disposition. Perhaps no wonder that a Hamburg institution like Berenberg Bank should already count a UK local government pension fund among its asset management clients – and that it should be hunting for more such clients outside the German speaking world.
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Interviews
Concentrating on value
“Believe it or not,” says David Barse, president and CEO of Third Avenue Management, “I think we’re boring. Our portfolio might look interesting, but we never change our style or basic investment philosophy for different markets, or even for different asset classes, market-caps or regions.
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Interviews
Concentrating on value
“Believe it or not,” says David Barse, president and CEO of Third Avenue Management, “I think we’re boring. Our portfolio might look interesting, but we never change our style or basic investment philosophy for different markets, or even for different asset classes, market-caps or regions. I once overheard an investor who thought he’d muted the conference phone say, ‘This guy says the same damn thing every time’. I thought that was the greatest compliment.”
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Features
Spreading the risk
Diversified growth lives up to its name, covering a diverse range of institutional strategies with diverse potential uses for pension funds, finds Christine Senior. But is the strategy discredited?
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Interviews
American half-century
f you are wondering why it took 50 years for American Century Investments to open its first offices outside the US, it is instructive to look at who owns the business. Among the partners, primary control is held by the cancer research group associated with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in the firm’s home town of Kansas City. About eight years ago American Century’s founder, Jim Stowers, now an octagenarian cancer survivor, donated almost all of his wealth to establish the institute. Since 2000, 40% of the firm’s profits have been paid as an annual dividend to the institute – a total of more than $750m.
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Interviews
Hedge fund hermeneutics
Although pension funds and their consultants are weaning themselves off their obsession with three-year track records, few would choose to park $1.3bn with a brand new fund of hedge funds – even if its founding partners bring two decades of experience from hedge fund stalwarts like Olympia, Pioneer and Momentum.
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Features
Easy riders
Portfolios of minimum variance stocks appear to reproduce a true risk factor beta that can outperform cap-weighted benchmarks. Martin Steward asks why no-one uses them in the real world
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Features
Is credit due?
Corporate bond managers insist that active management is no luxury in their asset class. Martin Steward asks if they are just talking their book
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Interviews
From silos to solutions
BlackRock has been active in fiduciary management since 2005, when it purchased the internal asset management operation of the Philips pension fund in the Netherlands and was awarded a fiduciary mandate to manage the assets.
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Interviews
Bigger in Japan
On 30 July Sumitomo Trust and Banking Company, the second biggest money manager in Japan, with assets under management at ¥26trn (€192.3bn), bought Nikko Asset Management, Japan’s seventh largest, with just over ¥9trn. It was second only to BlackRock-BGI in terms of this year’s biggest asset management M&A deals and will create Japan’s new number one, and yet media coverage in Europe was curiously muted.
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Interviews
Multiplying the multi-boutique
As a giant among asset managers describing itself as “multi-boutique”, one might expect BNY Mellon Asset Management (BNYMAM) to be scouring this consolidating industry, chequebook in hand. The recent announcement that it will buy Insight Investment Management from Lloyds Banking Group for £235m (€273m) shows that it is indeed in the market
