Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 342
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Country Report
Italy: Lessons from ENPAM
The ENPAM pension fund for medical professionals made the headlines last year after concerned members alerted the press to alleged wrong-doing. Carlo Svaluto Moreolo sheds light on a matter that has seen the former chairman under investigation for fraud and which also raises questions about transparency and governance at some Italian pension schemes
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Country Report
Italy: Governance hopes
Carlo Svaluto Moreolo spoke to senior figures at the Cometa and Fonchim closed pension funds about their plans and thoughts about the market
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: A welcome day
You can almost hear the sound of satisfied occupational pension fund representatives rubbing their hands together at the news that the IORP II Directive has been postponement.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: Taft-Hartley blues
Labour unions are not having the best time. Last month they suffered a major setback in Wisconsin, where Governor Walker won a recall election against union members and Democrats, who were protesting against his law removing most collective-bargaining rights from public employees. One reason why the unions lost is that those rights had assured very generous pension benefits to unionised public employees.
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Features
Look closely in the land of the cuckoo clock
Switzerland. Picture perfect, with its snow-capped mountains, glistening lakes and clean air. In fact, air pollution is a major environmental concern in Switzerland.
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Country Report
Switzerland: 99 questions
The Swiss pension industry is confronted with as many questions as answers while the government consults on second pillar reforms, writes Barbara Ottawa
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Country Report
Switzerland: The Swiss ESG paradox
Nina Röhrbein assesses why Swiss pension funds lag in ESG implementation, even though the country leads in terms of ESG asset management
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Country Report
Switzerland: The safe haven trap
Lukas Riesen and Alfred Bühler analyse the consequences for pension funds arising from the flight to ‘safe haven Switzerland’ and present possible solutions for dealing with this risk
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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
