Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 504
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Features
Procrastination and pan-European pensions
As opponents of the EU are fond of saying, Europe is a continent, not a country. The national interests of member states will inevitably take precedence over plans for cross-border co-operation. Naked nationalism will always be stronger than Panglossian proposals for pan-Europeanism
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Features
Growth and a greater number of products
“There’s life in the old dog yet” ran the title of the lead article in last year’s Spezialfonds issue. How true, how very true: in 2005, the excellent growth by Spezialfonds showed once again that some people had been a little too quick to write them off. In fact, the ...
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Features
A range of approaches
Pension funds have taken an array of approaches to currency management. Some are using pure hedging strategies, while others are adopting active management. Maha Khan Phillips talks to pension funds that think about currency in very different ways.
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Features
Bridging the credibility gap
The divergence between asset managers and pension funds about the products funds need is symptomatic of a wider gulf. Stephanie Schwartz-Driver reports
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Features
European consultancy shapes up for the future
Stricter regulation and disappointing investment performances during the past couple of years have shaken up the inter-relationship between asset managers, institutional investors and consultants. Two independent Dutch and German consultancy firms that are cooperating together explain their reasons against a changing scenario for their businesses
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Features
Is Swiss legislation restricting diversity
In an attempt to encourage so-called ‘riskless’ investing, Swiss pension laws may be preventing funds from allocating their assets properly. Antoine Cuénod reports
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Features
SocGen steps up its European presence
Société Générale’s €548m acquisition in January of 2S Banca, the securities services business of Italy’s UniCredit Group, is an important step in the French bank’s aim to become a Europe-wide player in the securities services business. 2S Banca was the second largest custodian in Italy, with more than €455bn in ...
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Features
Aegon’s €40bn pooling project with Citigroup
Citigroup Global Transaction Services is to build an investment platform for Aegon The Netherlands that will enable the Dutch insurance and pensions company to pursue a range of asset strategies across multiple jurisdictions. Sikko van Katwijk, managing director at Citigroup, said the platform is designed to help investment managers change ...
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Features
Bridging the social divide in Europe
Paritarian ideas are alive and well in Europe and could go some way to shaping its future identity, as Daniel Brooksbank discovers at AEIP’s tenth anniversary event
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Features
Lifting the veil in Germany
Frankfurt was the location last July for the first meeting between the asset managers and the consultants who act intermediaries between the investment sector and institutional investors. This meeting had been arranged by our organisation for a good reason. The situation of the German market is undergoing substantial change. The ...
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Features
Japan leads government bonds revival
Yield curve/duration ccording to OECD data, it seems that the G7 economies (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Canada) are in the midst of a slowdown, with the US ‘in the lead’ and the European economies joining the trend most recently. With inflation fears lessening, markets have taken significant ...
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Features
Why currency finds itself in the spotlight
Currency managers have long argued that pension funds need to adopt active currency strategies in a bid to gain alpha. Now, many pension funds agree. Maha Khan Phillips reports
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Features
Currency predictions: do they add value?
In IPE’s March issue, Compendeon’s Erik van Dijk and Harry Geels investigated if the strategists of investment management firms included in IPE’s Investment Managers Expectations survey added value through their bond market predictions. In this article, the authors analyse the added value of forecasts by currency strategists using a similar approach. Once again, they come up with some very interesting conclusions
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Features
The subtleties of the quest for alpha
The search for alpha, the current grail of active investment managers, has obscured the fact that alpha can be either positive or negative. Identifying and removing negative alpha can be as profitable for investors as finding positive alpha. In the current institutional investment climate, that is the strongest argument in ...
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Features
Arnott's RAFI models: 'dumb and smart'
Rob Arnott, RAFI’s designer, describes the basic model as “dumb”, meaning that it is a purely passive index. Research Affiliates and Informed Portfolio Management (IPM), the Stockholm based arm of First Quadrant, have since introduced a “smart ” or enhanced version of RAFI to show what a little judicious tweaking ...
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Features
Incremental steps for change
In Belgium, pension funds have traditionally taken an even-handed approach to the bond-equity split. And because they weighted their asset allocation neither heavily to debt nor to stocks, there were few changes to make when broader investment opinion came around to their way of thinking. Since the crash ...
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Features
Amonis spreads diversification net
At Belgian professional medical sector fund Amonis, the equity-bond ratio is exactly level at the moment - quite a change from the ratio before 2000 which was far more heavily weighted towards stocks. “Before then we had about 62% in equities and 30% in bonds,” says chief financial officer Tom ...
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Features
Bleak future for Taft-Hartley plans
Last May the FBI spent almost $250,000 (€197,000) digging for the remains of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared in 1975 a few miles from Detroit, Michigan. Many members of the union that used to be led by Hoffa and is now managed by his son James would have preferred ...
