Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 352
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IP Asia
Securities Services interview with BNP Paribas
IPA recently caught up with Patrick Colle, CEO of BNP Paribas Securities Services and his colleagues Lawrence Au, Head of Asia Pacific, and Jing Zeng, Managing Director (China) to hear their views on how Chinese institutions can move abroad, lessons for Asia from the European experience, and how technology is transforming back-end investment procedures.
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IP Asia
Equity sectors: The best form of defence
If you must hold equities, during volatile times it pays to be invested in the ‘safest’ businesses. But Martin Steward finds a changing world challenging old assumptions about which sectors contain these defensive stocks.
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Features
The more you struggle…
Remember Chinese finger traps? Those childhood toys that hold your fingertipsever more tightly the more you struggle to pull them free? Europe is full of them.
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Features
Alphabet soup
The UK’s pensions minister, Steve Webb, is brave to try to keep alive the concept of pensions risk sharing. At the annual chairman’s dinner of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) in February, he advocated what he termed ‘defined aspiration’ or ‘DA’ pensions to add to the already familiar DB and DC.
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Features
No Tobin for pensions
The concept of a universal financial transaction tax is a flawed one.
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Features
Returns up despite equity losses
Considering the year that was 2011, many pension fund CIOs would have been happy to balance out equity losses with returns in other asset portfolios. This is the situation for most pension funds to report their 2011 results – with diversification able to offset the volatile equity market that for some schemes led to losses of 20% in stock holdings.
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Features
Do hedge funds delay reporting to save face?
It is well known that databases of historical hedge fund returns suffer from a range of biases – chiefly ‘survivor bias’. The worst funds cease reporting their results, sometimes simply because they go out of business, and some of the best stop reporting when they no longer need to raise assets.
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Features
Trouble at the top
The news that Dutch civil service pension scheme ABP is suing Goldman Sachs over claims of a mis-sold collateralised debt obligation (CDO) raises questions over what counts as adequate due diligence. The €246bn fund – which has already sued Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan over the same issue – alleges in a complaint filed in New York that the bank knew the product was riskier than it let on.
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Opinion Pieces
Long-term Matters: Stop enabling corruption
My invitation to Prague last November had one drawback. The seminar was about corporate and political corruption. How depressing. Still, invited by the liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute and convened by a leading US ambassador, how could I refuse?
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Features
J’en ai marre
IASB project manager Denise Durant’s opening words to the 18 January IFRS Interpretations Committee meeting were innocuous enough: “We are not discussing the proposed amendment to IAS 1 derived from the conceptual framework because this amendment was proposed directly by the board and not by the committee.” Instead, she explained, the amendment “is going to be discussed at a later stage by the board.”
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Opinion Pieces
Kees Cool, Groningen University, and Anton van Nunen, Syntrus Achmea
For the first time since the introduction of the Dutch pension law in 1954, pensioners are to be told that their pensions will be cut by 3-4% from April 2013. Also, companies might be forced to pay extra contributions. The stated reason for this is the low coverage ratios of pension funds. But that this is not correct. By calculating a wrong coverage ratio, employees and pensioners are unduly and unnecessarily hurt, and economic growth is frustrated.
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Interviews
Being long-term in a short-term world
How do you make long-term investment plans in a short-term environment?
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Features
Help trustees to stay on the ball
Gail Moss outlines how pension funds can develop training schemes to enable trustees carry out their duties competently
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Features
Alpha hunters
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Gediminas Milieska of SEB’s Lithuanian pension funds, who explains how his firm uses three types of open-ended funds to generate alpha
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Country Report
Belgium: Clarity after deadlock
After more than a year of political deadlock, Belgium’s new government has pensions in its sights. Christine Senior reports
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Features
One year later
The Tohoku earthquake of March 2011 was one of the most devastating natural disasters of recent times. Martin Steward asks if it has changed the way investors look at their Japanese equity portfolios
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Features
Keiretsu culture
Japan’s corporate governance culture has been moving, albeit slowly, towards Western models. But Nina Röhrbein finds that the Olympus scandal could lead to some push-back
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Asset Class Reports
European Equities: A stockpickers’ environment…
… if you can wait a decade for active risk to pay off. Joseph Mariathasan finds managers enjoying rich pickings for the long term, by taking account of – but also looking through – the dominant macro themes
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Asset Class Reports
European Equities: The middle way
Successful risk-taking in European equities during 2011 was more nuanced than it first appears, finds Martin Steward
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Asset Class Reports
European Equities: Two different routes to risk
How should you be positioned at the inflection point of one of the strangest economic cycles in history? Martin Steward finds the consistent performers rotating into pro-cyclical stocks in both top-down and bottom-up strategies
