All IPE articles in June 2005 (Magazine) – Page 3
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Features
Volatility at the short end
Although the European Central Bank (ECB) may not have changed official interest rates since the half-point cut back in June 2003, that does not mean to imply interest rates at the short end have also remained unchanged. TheECB may be controlling and setting the very short-term rate - via its ...
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Features
Enemy at the gates
As institutional demand for hedge funds grows, not all providers will be able to meet the emerging standards for the industry, according to a recent report. Those firms that want to thrive in the maturing market will have to adopt new ways of doing business. Last year’s report, ‘Institutional Demand ...
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Features
Ensuring good performance
Performance and risk analysis have gone a long way since the dark ages of investment, when returns were measured in rather raw form, while risk was hardly measured at all. These days, pension plan trustees are enlightened by slick performance reports, including hundreds of statistics, thoroughly calculated and well-presented with ...
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Features
The eternal triangle
The pension problem is simple: a question of assets, liabilities and the difference between them - an asset or liability. Risk is mostly simply and generally defined as the rate of change of an object. The rate of change of an asset’s value, its risk, we know by the term ...
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Features
Risk exposure stalls growth
As can be seen from table 1, the main hedge fund strategies all fell short of their long-term average performance in March. Three of the five strategies, namely convertible arbitrage, long/short equity and event driven, even posted negative returns. These disappointing returns might be explained by the exposure of hedge ...
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Features
Oil for extra virgin wheels
Italy’s new defined contribution (DC) schemes have got off to a slow start. Having become operational only a few years ago, assets under management of the industry-specific contrattuali - literally contractual, or closed - schemes were just short of E6bn at the end of September, with just over a million ...
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Features
Securing the family fortune
Barbara von Gartzen of Family Estate Services (FES) in Luxembourg says: “Attitudes towards wealth management have changed significantly. Until a few years ago, most high net worth individuals have been looking after their wealth mainly by themselves.” Nowadays, managing the wealth of a family has become a highly complex and ...
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Features
Fighting fund fraud
Recently, Frankfurt’s public prosecutor began a criminal investigation into a senior employee at Phoenix Kapitaldienst, a German hedge fund manager that has now been told by the financial services regulator (BaFin) to cease trading. The employee is alleged to have siphoned off E700m from the fund. And while those hardest ...
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Features
Getting it right first time
Following the poor returns of the last bear market, institutional investors have recognised the need for diversification in their investment portfolios. Post-Myners, many pension funds are seeking to match their liabilities by investing in alternative asset classes such as hedge funds. The mainstreaming of an industry that has traditionally been ...
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Special Report
Getting to the point
Pictet has been developing tools to assess companies’ SRI credentials since 1997. The problem, it seems, is that much of the information provided by companies under examination is incomplete. “Very often a company will put together a sustainability report but it will only show what it wants to show,” says ...
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Features
The global transformation
We are in the midst of a revolution in the organisation of global markets and the competitiveness of corporate form and functions. This has enormous implications for financial markets and their interest in defined benefit (DB) pension liabilities. Employer-sponsored funded supplementary pensions were a success story in Anglo-American economies and ...
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Features
Too good to be true?
During our research of the hedge fund results, we analysed the 35 hedge fund categories available in the HFR database (www.hedgefund-research.com). The HFR database is one of the largest of its kind and covers approximately 4,150 hedge funds and fund of funds. From this database the HFRI indices are derived. ...
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Special Report
Who's for governance?
Corporate governance has been on the agenda for many years, but for most pension schemes the attention has been focused on the governance of the companies in which they invest rather than the governance of the pension fund itself. Now, however, pension schemes and their governing boards are being subject ...
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Features
Politicians play hardball
According to the government official statistics, the ratio of people 65 years old and over in Japan would double from 17.3% in 2000 to 35.7% in 2050. Without substantial reforms, social security pensions would be unsustainable in this century, so the pension reform is currently the biggest political and economical ...
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Features
A match made in heaven
In the aftermath of the bursting of the internet bubble, pension funds were forced to cope with an extremely unfavourable environment. Stock markets were plunging and interest rates were falling to historically low levels. Pension funds in general, and European pension funds in particular, have therefore seen the gap between ...
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Special Report
Investors take LTRI initiative
The last five years have seen a sea change in investment beliefs and practices. Previously those who might have raised concerns about market short-termism would have been dismissed as ideologically motivated critics, and those who favoured SRI, as having other agendas. While passionate defenders of the status quo have not ...
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Features
Joined-up thinking
Robin Ellison, the incoming chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), may not be the first UK pension person to lose their bearings in Brussels. But he’s almost certainly the only one to actually get completely lost in the Belgian countryside. It occurred when he was en route ...
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Features
Lattelekom: one of a kind
First Closed Pension Fund, the pension fund for telecoms and electricity supply workers in Latvia, is the only registered pension fund in the country where the employers are also the pension fund’s shareholders. One of the legal requirements of the Latvia’s reformed pension system is that companies that wish to ...
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