Martin Steward
- Special Report
Securities Services: New rules, new threats, new opportunities
We leave the bad news for custodians until last in this month’s special report on securities services. Andrew Williams of Mercer Sentinel outlines the difference that a good transition-management process can make relative to a bad one. Then he questions which of those categories leaving it to your custodian falls ...
- Asset Class Reports
Emerging Market Debt: Missing linkers
Emerging-market inflation-linked bonds are entering a new era. Martin Steward asks how they might fit into European institutional investors’ portfolios
- Asset Class Reports
Emerging Market Debt: The great correlation
Emerging market debt has been driven by Fed policy more than fundamentals
- Features
The EM story is evolving, not ending
This month will mark five years since the Lehman bankruptcy, years that have seen some changes in pension fund attitudes to risk. Counterparty risk now matters. There is ‘tail risk’.
- Interviews
Bradesco AM: Taking local global
Surprisingly, for its size, Bradesco has spent most of its first 50 years as a resolutely local firm
NewsDirect lending 'compelling', but asset managers ill-prepared, says SocGen
EUROPE – Industry has 'just 12-18 months' to organise resources, infrastructure for coming supply.
- Interviews
Beyond US sub-prime
If Philip Weingord, co-founder and CEO of Seer Capital Management, isn’t ‘Mr Structured Credit’, then co-founder and CIO Richard d’Albert would be just as good a candidate.
- Features
If it looks like a duck
Hybrid corporate bonds are taking off as investors scramble for yield. But Martin Steward wonders if the hybdridity balance is shifting against investors
- Features
Taking the sugar out of the alphabet soup
Jeroen Dijsselbloem has been taking sweeties away from the finance industry again. The Dutch finance minister and Eurogroup president has told pension funds not to expect the same inflation premium on future PPP projects that they enjoyed on the N33 motorway deal.
NewsStandard & Poor's launches mid-market credit initiative
EUROPE – 'Mid-Market Evaluation' aims to provide investors foothold in opaque market.
NewsBonds: What if the sell-off is about growth, not 'QE tapering'?
Martin Steward worries that bond markets are telling a different story than the newspapers.
- News
Key influencers at pension funds 'sceptical' of private equity
GLOBAL – Coller Capital’s latest Global Barometer finds entrenched resistance to asset class.
- Features
Rock ‘n’ roll yield
Music publishing rights are a proven inflation-sensitive cash-flow asset, and Martin Steward finds that fast-changing music consumption habits are generating not threats, but opportunities
- Special Report
Risk & Portfolio Construction: ‘The wake-up call was 2008’
In April 2010, PGGM decided to build its own managed account platform (MAP) using know-how and technology from veteran Lyxor Asset Management. It had been investing in hedge funds for its clients since 2003 – they account for about 3-5% of total assets.
- Special Report
Risk & Portfolio Construction: Un-mixing the market ingredients
Breaking down asset class into their respective common factor risks seems to yield real analytical insights. Martin Steward asks what investors should do in practice with those insights
- Special Report
Risk & Portfolio Construction: ‘It’s not overly quantitative’
Look at how SAUL’s financial reports represent its asset allocation and you quickly realise that it does not think about that allocation in terms of asset classes, but in terms of strategies designed to meet well-defined objectives related to its funding position. There is the common split between ‘risk-reducing’ assets ...
- Special Report
Risk & Portfolio Construction: ‘Our objective is clear’
Often when an investor starts to explore ‘smart beta’ – alternative weighting systems for equity portfolios and benchmarks – it signals some dissatisfaction with traditional active management, traditional market cap-weighted benchmarks, or both. Not so in the case of the Rabobank Pensioenfonds.
Special ReportRisk & Portfolio Construction: A smart-beta framework
Martin Steward speaks with Lombard Odier’s Jérôme Teiletche, co-author of a new paper that compares alternative equity portfolio construction techniques within a common framework
- Special Report
Risk & Portfolio Construction: ‘All equities are black boxes’
In January 2011 the PNO Media Pension Fund terminated its US and European equity enhanced-index mandates with Barclays Global Investors and brought the assets in-house. However, it did not go passive – or at least, not in the sense in which most of us would understand the term.
- Features
We were all caught naked
IPE hosted Stanford Business School’s Anat Admati this month, in town promoting The Bankers’ New Clothes, the well-received book she co-wrote with Martin Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute.
