Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 274
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Country Report
Spain: A pessimistic outlook for pensions
Spanish workers can expect to receive detailed information from their employers about their retirement outlook, according to Carlo Svaluto Moreolo. Few think this will boost supplementary retirement savings at a time when the government is reducing tax incentives
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Special Report
German Asset Management: Willing but mostly unable
Low yields mean German institutions continue to look at infrastructure. But the opportunities they find are mostly unattractive, says Barbara Ottawa
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Special Report
Real Assets: Let's roll
Backwardation is back in commodity futures curves. Martin Steward asks, can investors at last expect to be paid for taking risk in the asset class, or is it a flash in the pan?
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Asset Class Reports
High-yield Bonds & Loans: Covenants and calls
Joseph Mariathasan and Martin Steward ask whether investors’ traditional protections are getting squeezed out in the convergence of high yield bond and loan markets
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Special Report
German Asset Management: Robust in spite of regulatory change
Institutional investors have maintained their confidence in Spezialfonds through the regulatory changes of the past few years and providers can look forward to a good 2015, according to Till Entzian
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Special Report
Real Assets: Digging a way out of the hole
The misery index reached a new low in Australia this summer as the mining slump continued to bite. But, as Christopher O’Dea reports, a new round of investment is looming as leading emerging-market producers target a bigger share of revenue from their mineral resources and mining companies cut unprofitable projects
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Asset Class Reports
High-yield Bonds & Loans: Lien and healthy?
Jennifer Bollen finds booming leverage markets bringing second-lien debt back into vogue in private equity deals – and in Europe, that can mean mezzanine-like risk
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Country Report
Portugal: Confidence returns
Portugal’s supplementary pension funds have increased their equity weightings but are still cautious on fixed-income, writes Gail Moss
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Country Report
Pensions Caixa 30 to move from Spanish bonds to illiquid assets
Evolution not revolution is the name of the game for Pensions Caixa 30, Spain’s largest pension fund with €4bn assets under management, a further €1.59bn in insurance policies and almost 44,000 members at present.
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Special Report
Real Assets: Generating returns
Energy and power in Europe is subject to long-term plans to improve the single market, but also buffeted by the short-term vicissitudes of politics, geopolitics and even natural disaster. Daniel Ben-Ami attempts to clarify the investment themes
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Asset Class Reports
High-yield Bonds & Loans: Floored argument
More and more loans are being written with interest rate floors, at lower and lower rates. While these were a great feature over the past five years, Charlotte Moore asks whether they weaken investors’ floating-rate protection for the next five years
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Special Report
Real Assets: Real challenges
Frances Hudson outlines just how many obstacles lie between pension funds and investment in European real assets, and calls for further debt and securitisation to open up the market
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Asset Class Reports
High-yield Bonds & Loans: Slow but steady progress
While some European countries are making progress with respect to non-bank funding for mid-market businesses, others still have some way to go. Yet there is a growing appetite for the standardisation and transparency required to develop this market, write Alexandra Krief and Taron Wade
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Special Report
Real Assets: The sting in the loan tail
Frédéric Blanc-Brude and Majid Hasan present a rigorous – yet implementable – framework for measuring the performance of private infrastructure debt
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Asset Class Reports
High-yield Bonds & Loans: Low yields, high alpha
With spreads so tight, high-yield has become even more of a bottom-up stockpickers’ market than usual. Martin Steward looks for themes in the top-performing portfolios
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Special Report
Real Assets: Learning from the crisis
European commercial real estate debt is a compelling investment opportunity. But Gareck Wilson warns that new entrants must consider the lessons learned during the recentdownturn, as they provide a valuable insight into the potential pitfalls
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Features
The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of costs
Controversies around pension funds’ asset management costs in various countries tell us something about the mood of the times, but they also suggest that changes are needed in the way pension boards select and justify their strategy choices to members and the wider world.
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Features
Divergence trades, depression trades
“It’s one of our big themes,” said Kathleen Hughes, head of European institutional sales at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, talking about central bank policy divergence over meet-the-press drinks in early September, four hours after European Central Bank president Mario Draghi had taken the deposit rate further into negative territory and announced plans to purchase covered bonds and asset-backed securities. The euro had a terrible day; Goldman Sachs had a pretty good one.
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Features
No rush for auto enrolment
As part of their commitment to turn around their economies, Spain and Portugal have tackled pension issues, both by reducing expenditure and by taking the first steps towards making retirement systems fairer and more efficient.
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Features
Pensions in the picture
Just three years after Europe’s pension fund representative bodies were successful in their proposal to create a separate occupational pensions stakeholder group within the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) – under the previous CEIOPS committee of pension and insurance supervisors a single stakeholder group covered both sectors – there is now a proposal to merge the two stakeholder groups. Although this will have to be ratified by the European Parliament, here are a few points that might help those involved understand why this issue really matters.
