Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 346
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Features
Keeping tabs on the costs
Pension funds and trustees need to know exactly what different DC pension providers are charging so they can compare them against each other. Gail Moss reports
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Features
Sentiment undimmed
Frank Schnattinger outlines the key findings of IPE Institutional Investment’s 2012 survey following trends in the German-speaking institutional market
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Country Report
France: Life after downgrade
Gail Moss tests the institutional investment waters after January’s S&P downgrade and ahead of Solvency II
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Country Report
Nordic Region: Lonely hearts club
The government has announced plans to channel pension fund assets into debt financing for SMEs. Rachel Fixsen outlines the various initiatives
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Country Report
Nordic Region: Hard to beat
IPE looks at the sucess of AP7’s 2010 decision to overhaul its investment strategy
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Country Report
Nordic Region: Going long
Sweden, with stable finances and a debt-to-GDP ratio of under 33% is an attractive safe haven for many investors. However, precisely these low debt levels have led to reduced need for longer-dated issuance, currently only 5.6% of debt outstanding. Jonathan Williams looks at reactions to the country’s recent 20-year bond exchange
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Features
Small is beautiful
Smaller companies make up the vast majority of the economy, are better-aligned with shareholders, more entrepreneurial – and not necessarily young and inexperienced. No wonder they both outperform and diversify large-caps, writes Nick Hamilton
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Features
Political decisions for investors
Helene Williamson outlines the complex process of assessing political risk in emerging markets and warns investors they ignore this risk their peril
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Special Report
Liability-Driven Investing:Making the trend your friend
Do absolute- return bond strategies have a role to play in LDI? Martin Steward considers the possibilities
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Special Report
Moves in microfinance
Despite suffering some negative perceptions, the asset class is cleaning up its act and gaining new fans, says Nina Röhrbein
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Features
All change
Iain Morse finds that the creation of a single, mandatory central settlement depositary later this year will have wide-ranging effects on the trading and settlement of securities in Russia
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Interviews
Making an impact on SMEs
The conviction articulated on its website – ‘We believe that market forces and entrepreneurship can be harnessed to do well by doing good’ – hardly distinguishes the £275m (€333m) London-based sustainable growth investor Bridges Ventures (Bridges) from other investors in the environmental, social or governance (ESG) domain. But its investment strategy certainly does.
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Interviews
A new titan in Asian equities
The timing could have been better. Just days before the finalisation of the merger of the Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co and Chuo Mitsui Asset Trust & Banking Co, the latter was fined by Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission (SESC) for an insider trading breach that took place nearly two years ago.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Retirement questions
Here in the Netherlands we like to hold a special event for our colleagues when they retire. And there is usually something extra special when someone senior takes their pension.
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Features
Focus Group: Risky business
Twenty-seven respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey used liability-driven investment (LDI) strategies. On average, 63% of their liability risk was currently hedged.
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Asset Class Reports
Private Equity: Let’s work together
Private equity co-investment looks like a great deal for limited partners. But Martin Steward finds that it is demanding enough to require intermediation, even for large investors withestablished general partner networks
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Opinion Pieces
Politics of change
The nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate to the White House may bring a lot of attention to the US pension fund industry. If he wins the election on 6 November, he could introduce a partial privatisation of Social Security, the compulsory insurance programme funded through payroll taxes. The first president to talk about privatising it was also a Republican one, George W Bush, but his proposal went nowhere.
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Features
Pensionsfonds, 10 years on
It is said that more tax literature exists in German than in any other language. This may be true, but Germany’s institutional investment set-up, as well as its five occupational pensions ‘vehicles’, seems almost as infuriatingly complex to the outsider as the country’s fiscal system.
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Features
The tug-of-war continues
It is difficult to argue against the notion that funded pension benefits should be well capitalised. Those who argue that the benefits should be more secure would say this is so precisely because they are such an important part of a person’s lifetime earnings. But there are plenty of arguments ...
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Features
The Brussels tug-of-war continues
Getting a place at the public hearing on the revised IORP Directive in Brussels was quite a challenge. The 400 seats the European Commission set aside for the pension fund industry were all spoken for within a matter of days. Nobody wanted to miss the chance to hear what Brussels ...
