Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 541
-
Features
Early retirement trend slows
Europe seems to be slowly inching away from its early retirement tendencies, according to the latest data on pensions expenditure issued by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical bureau. The release of this data coincides with the publication of a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which calls ...
-
Special Report
Missing the ESG sea-change
Fiduciary responsibility has been reinvented to include environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations – this was the clear message to pension funds and their trustees, as well as the consultants and asset managers who work with them that emerged from the 2005 United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) ...
-
Features
Demographics looming in Asia
The annual Asian Pension Fund Roundtable has established a reputation as a high level think-tank on best practice and corporate governance. Under the heading ‘Demographic pressures in Asia: Driving retirement system reform and capital market development’, this year’s event, held in Beijing, brought together representatives from pension funds, government agencies ...
-
Features
EU support needed for 'new' Europe
Much more co-ordinated action is needed at EU level to speed up pension reforms in the new member states, which are likely to suffer from an even greater demographic imbalance than “old” Europe, a conference in Brussels heard on November 14. The new member states were also told how they ...
-
Features
Fishing in a lively pond
For Freud it was ‘id’. For investors, should it be ‘mid’? Yes. Mid caps are under-researched and under-owned, which makes them fertile ground for stockpickers. The availability of information in this area of the market is poor. So there is good potential to benefit from identifying positive change in companies ...
-
Features
Satisfied by sexy industry
Han Thoman recently retired as managing director of Blue Sky Group, which manages the pension assets of airline KLM and several other clients. He also stepped down as chairman of OPF, the Dutch organisation for company pension funds. He joined Blue Sky in 1999 as it was spun off from ...
-
Features
Managers: can they predict?
IPE’s Investment Manager’s Expectation Indicator displays predictions on different asset classes of approximately 122 asset managers and is published in every issue of IPE. Russell Investment Group, in the data pages each month, summarises the total figures of how many managers are positive, neutral or negative. This summary gives an ...
-
Features
Pricing in credit risks
As Bund yields touch down to another all-time low, do investment grade credit spreads also have further to shrink? “We are not back at the (credit spread) lows we reached back at the end of February/early March this year,” says Klaas Smits of Robeco Asset Management. “And we are not ...
-
Features
Structured CDOs: keeping track of the overlap?
The growth of structured credit markets in Europe and across the world seems pretty much unstoppable. According to the British Banking Association, at the end of 2003 the global market for credit derivatives (excluding asset swaps) accounted for $3.5 trn (e2.9trn) and could reach $8.2 trn by 2006. Collateralised debt ...
-
Features
Commission clawback
With cost cutting a priority for most pension funds, providers of commission recapture programmes should have no trouble persuading funds to sign up. After all, commission recapture gives investors a systematic way of recouping some of the brokerage commission they pay. But not all pension clients make use of it, ...
-
Features
Hidden costs of trading revealed
Most trustees have no problem in seeing why investment performance must be monitored. The success or failure of the entire fund is at stake. But when it comes to putting transaction costs under the microscope, the exercise can sometimes seem too arcane to bother with. Still, many pension funds are ...
-
Features
Crisis! What crisis?
The current debate about pensions and about how society can best adapt to an ageing population is distorted by the belief that ageing is a huge economic and social problem, leading to a sense of crisis. Yet the population will not age overnight and we have some 20 years to ...
-
Features
Difficult to apply
Behavioural finance achieved real respectability three years ago when Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in this area. Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky are best known for their work on Prospect Theory. A simple rendering of this theory would be that people have an irrational tendency ...
-
Features
More attractive than ever
According to Jerome Booth at London-based specialist asset manager Ashmore: “In emerging markets, debt outperforms equities except in a rally, so the definition of an emerging market is one where the equity risk premium is negative.” While you may believe that his view is prejudiced since Ashmore is a leading ...
-
Features
Life after attribution
Your managers may be investing in new risk and attribution capabilities, but are they ready for the knock-on effects? As an investor in the fixed income funds, you may not be too concerned with the relationship between your manager’s front, middle and back offices. As long as your funds are ...
-
Features
Pension fund contagion fears
European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet has warned that pension funds and insurers could be sources of vulnerabilities that could spread “contagion” in the wider financial system. Trichet, speaking in Frankfurt, pointed out that pension funds and insurers might be “sources of vulnerabilities through their increased interdependences and linkages with ...
