Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 341
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Country Report
Switzerland: Larger fish to fry
Switzerland’s largest public Pensionskasse, Publica, has a new director but the tracks towards a more sustainable future of the fund had been laid before his arrival, finds Barbara Ottawa
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Country Report
The Mediterranean: Injection of enthusiasm
Smart tax reforms look likely to boost Turkey’s small supplementary pension sector, which is predicted to reach €100bn by 2023, according to Reeta Paakkinen
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Special Report
Smart Beta: A smart beta taxonomy
Daniel Leveau and Des Morris categorise the alternative indexing universe and recommend that investors build diversified, smart-beta portfolios. By focusing on risk and return, they should achieve the desired results
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Special Report
Smart Beta: Creating custom solutions
John Krieg discusses the findings of a survey of institutional investors’ changing perspectives on passive investing, and the growing use of customised beta strategies
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Special Report
Smart Beta: How equal-weighting wins
Yuliya Plyakha, Raman Uppal and Grigory Vilkov discover a surprising crop of non-systematic alpha generated by the monthly rebalancing process
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Special Report
Smart Beta: Debt and demographics
Investors should look for risk to be compensated by attractive premia. But Christoph Gort argues that market-cap weighted bond indices fail to deliver this. New index methodologies will allow for more efficient global bond investing
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Asset Class Reports
US Equities: Storm clouds gather over US economy
Shaniel Ramjee worries that markets are misreading the seriousness of the US fiscal position – a situation complicated by a looming budget cut of $1.2bn
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Asset Class Reports
US Equities: Still value to be found on upside
Martin Steward finds some surprising potential for growth at the heart of generally defensive portfolios
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Features
Risky business
Some 43% of the respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey had investments that were not benchmarked. Of those respondents that did, it is no surprise that illiquid and non-listed assets dominated – real estate, infrastructure and private equity – along with some absolute return and cash mandates.
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Country Report
Switzerland: Pension funds seek returns
Persistent low interest rates are making it harder to achieve risk-free returns. Pension funds will need the tailwind of friendly stock markets, argues Peter Bänziger
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Special Report
Risk Parity: Simple idea, complex questions
Brendan Maton asks what the track records of risk parity strategies can tell us about their suitability for new economic environments, and how they might fit into the thinking of European pension funds suitability for new economic environments, and how they might fit into the thinking of European pension funds
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Special Report
Risk Parity: Risk parity for a single asset class
Pure risk parity just about works in a multi-asset class context. For individual asset classes, Joseph Mariathasan finds that it needs to be constrained and adapted – but still offers a useful corrective to the biases of the cap-weighted portfolio
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Special ReportRisk Parity: Risk parity for pension schemes?
Gearing-up on bonds looks remarkably like LDI, notes Gwion Moore. So what does this tell us about the suitability of risk parity for an investor whose starting point is a significant short position in long-dated interest rates?
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Special Report
Risk Parity: ‘Risk parity is not sufficient’
Martin Steward discusses the philosophy behind the risk-factor allocation approach adopted by Danish pension fund ATP with CIO Henrik Gade Jepsen – and the impact of a new risk environment on its strategy
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Special Report
Risk Parity: I’m a (cautious) believer
The principles of risk parity may be sound, the CEO of AIMCo tells Joel Kranc, but the exuberance must be tempered by the current economic climate
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Special Report
Risk Parity: A better balance
Joel Kranc discusses the rationale for a gradual shift to the risk parity model with Bill Estabrook, executive director with Ohio Police & Fire Pension Fund
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Features
Greece will have to ‘win ugly’ again
With hindsight, it all peaked at 20.42pm, eight years ago on 4 July.
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Features
Straitened times, new measures
This year’s IPE Top 400 Asset Managers survey charts a flatlining global asset management industry with total AUM of €36.3trn at end-2011, a whisker up from the previous year’s total of €36.2trn. And despite striking a rare note of optimism in this month’s magazine as we report projections for the Turkish pension market to grow to €100bn in 10 years, the outlook is also gloomy for Europe’s pension markets. European institutional assets were down 3.5% in 2011, according to our survey.
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Features
From our perspective: The belt tightens
Europe’s economic turmoil is depressing defined benefit (DB) pension funding levels as yields drop and coverage ratios move in tandem. The fall in the 30-year euro swap rate from 2.54% to 2.19% between 25 Apr and 15 May makes certain that rights cuts will have to take place at Dutch pension funds, which have little hope of recovery in the short term. UK pension funding levels, and those in other countries, have also moved south, with implications for asset allocation and policy making.
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Features
Regulation more worrying than contagion
News last month that JP Morgan Chase reported more than $2bn (€1.6bn) in trading losses brought to mind the fears of 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers shook the financial world to its core. But the main difference between now and then is that participants in the derivatives market seem more concerned about new regulation than about the threat of contagion.
