Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 290
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Features
Focus Group: Feeling deflated
Participants in this month’s Focus Group are quite concerned about disinflationary pressures and the threat of deflation – especially in the euro-zone. Taking the euro-zone as a whole, the ‘core’ euro-zone, and the UK, respondents consider near-zero inflation as ‘inconceivable’ only in the latter. By contrast, four out of the 20 investors polled rate the risk of deflation as ‘high’ in the euro-zone as a whole.
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Special Report
Investing for Income: The futures look bright
Emma Cusworth finds investors looking for pure dividend bets and an illiquidity premium willing to take the other side from the traditional bank players in dividend futures trades
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Asset Class Reports
US Equities: Let’s get together
Joseph Mariathasan looks at trends in corporate activity in the US market
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Asset Class Reports
US Equities: How deep is your value?
Martin Steward looks at three US quality-value strategies, two of which exemplify the difference between ‘deep’ and ‘relative’ value and one whose profile belies any stylistic categorisation
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Opinion Pieces
Towards a 29th regime
A single-market regime for third-pillar pensions has moved closer with a paper entitled Towards an EU-Single Market for Personal Pensions from the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA).
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Opinion Pieces
Retirement saving boost
Who will manage the new My Retirement Account (MyRA) retirement savings vehicle? This is a big question for the US pension fund industry now that President Barack Obama has created the new programme.
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Asset Class Reports
US Equities: No place like home
Joseph Mariathasan asks if the relative home bias of North American companies might be a shelter from the geopolitical and economic storms rattling international markets
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Asset Class Reports
US Equities: Catching the technology wave
Joseph Mariathasan discusses where US technology companies sit in relation to a once-in-a-generation paradigm shift: the move from desktop to mobile and the cloud
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Interviews
Cautious, Swiss and international
As an institutional manager and provider of institutional-type investment management services to private banks, including within its own group, Pictet Asset Management (PAM) clearly stands apart from the private banking fraternity.
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Special ReportSmart beta: A genuine revolution
Remember 130/30 funds? Most investment journalists do, because they delivered one of those periodic lessons in a major peril of their profession – getting caught up with next hot product
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Special Report
Smart beta: Blurring the lines
The smart-beta or factor revolution is breaking down the boundaries between active and passive management. But Brendan Maton finds this introducing as many new questions as solutions
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Special Report
Smart beta: A match made in smart-beta heaven?
Combining fundamental indexation and minimum variance appears to smooth out the bumpy ride usually associated with harvesting the value-risk premium, finds Charlotte Moore
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Special Report
Smart beta: Collecting the premiums
Martin Steward spoke to Denmark’s PKA about its pioneering approach to extracting risk and return from equity markets – and beyond
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Special Report
Smart beta: Smart beta's Tower of Babel
Smart beta systematically introduces different risks than those contained in the market portfolio – and yet mandates are still generally benchmarked against the market. Brendan Maton writes about the urgent need for more suitable measures of risk and return
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Special Report
Smart beta: A question of governance
Andrew Ang and Alfred Slager shared the stage at a recent seminar. Martin Steward reports on how the debate has moved from the ‘if’ questions to the ‘how’
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Special Report
Smart beta: Every drop of return
Martin Stewardspoke to the Environment Agency Pension Fund, 2013 IPE Award winner for smart beta, about its adoption of diversity weighting, fundamental indexation and low-volatility strategies
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Special ReportThe smart beta family tree
The range of new forms of ‘beta’ can leave investors bewildered. Martin Steward’s illustrative taxonomy offers a flavour of how these solutions might be categorised and how they relate to one another, and lists the key research papers that first described each methodology.
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Country Report
Belgium: Belgian funds on course
Belgium has doubled occupational pension fund participation in the last 10 years and returns were a healthy 6.7% in 2013, writes Iain Morse
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Country Report
Belgium: A DC future: KBC Pensioenfonds
KBC has introduced a DC pension fund for new members starting from the beginning of 2014 and closed its DB fund. The fund is one of Belgium’s largest pension schemes, founded in 1941 with €1.2bn in assets and 15,500 active members.
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Special Report
Europe’s Pension Consultants: Are fees wasted?
After a recent academic paper raised serious questions about consultants’ competence in manager selection, Gail Moss talks to the industry about the nuances of the research and the defence of their practices
