Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 555
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Special Report
Price of taking responsibility
Environmental considerations are set to play an increasingly significant role in investment policy following two major new developments earlier this year. The Kyoto Protocol became a legally binding treaty in February. It aims to slow down global warming by demanding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2% ...
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Special Report
Digging up the dirt
Today extractive companies - those specialised in extracting natural resources from the ground - are operating in environments that are very different to those in which they operated 10 or more years ago. The oil industry is a good example. As oil reserves in areas such as the North Sea ...
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Features
Managing liability risk
It is a challenging time for pension funds. In a low-return environment, many are tackling funding shortfalls, and are searching for new ways to generate alpha. In the past, schemes used conventional benchmarking to measure performance and risk. The fallibility of such an approach became obvious after the market downturn, ...
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Features
Pooling - waiting for the waters to stir
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford owns an antique violin called the Messiah. It was made by Stradivarius in 1716 and remained in his family workshop until 1775 when it was sold by his son, Paolo, to an Italian dealer. From there, it passed to a collector, Luigi Tarsio, who used ...
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Features
Building total return portfolios
When choosing an active equity manager, institutional investors typically focus on the manager’s ability to ensure that its products consistently outperform both their equity benchmark and their peers. Investors looking for absolute returns tend to focus on equity long/short strategies to profit from a manager’s stock selection skills. However, many ...
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Features
Three months positive
Despite the poor performance of stock markets (especially the small cap and growth stock segments), hedge funds managed to take advantage of the good performance of bond markets and the rally on the commodity markets to post positive returns for the third month in a row. CTA Global funds achieved ...
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Features
Strong FoF summer recovery continues
Riding the recovery wave that began in May and rose in June, global markets continued to yield very good returns for funds of funds all round. The Eurekahedge Global Fund of Funds Index returned 1.6% in July and tentatively is up 0.8% in August The best performance came from funds ...
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Features
Measured approach
The past few years has seen tremendous institutional investor inflows into commodities. Most investors have chosen to adopt a passive exposure to begin with. It means that choosing a commodity index is one of the most important decisions that an investor can make. It is sometimes easy to forget that ...
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Features
Strong at home and away
With its roots in the first Danish mutual fund launched in 1928, Danske Capital was established in 1996 by Danske Bank to consolidate the group’s asset management activities. It is now one of the largest asset managers in the Nordic area with total assets under management of DKK435bn (e58bn). It ...
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Special Report
Investors act on climate change
On 14 September, in the New York offices of investment bank JP Morgan, around 200 institutional investors, financial analysts and government officials gathered to hear the results of the third Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire. Speaking were luminaries including Margaret Beckett, the UK’s secretary of state for the environment; Jim ...
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Features
Capitalising on progress
France’s system of universal retirement provision dates back to the years immediately following the second world war. The role of the compulsory pay-as-you go (répartition) element has long been significant and is in line with the strong Gallic preference for the social model. This preference dates back even further – ...
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Features
Success comes to the nimble-footed
Industriens Pension is the largest of a number of pension schemes based on collective bargaining agreements that were established in Denmark in the early 1990s to provide supplementary pensions for the country’s workers. The scheme covers the entire industrial sector and has around 320,000 members in 8,200 companies. The industrial ...
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Features
Uncertainties spawn hybrids
The shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plan designs has been widely reported in the UK and further a field. However, a ‘pure’ DC scheme is not always possible and, even when it is, it is not always the ideal solution. To what extent are we ...
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Features
Devising an investable index
There has been a growing emphasis on pension fund liability management and creating a portfolio of assets to match these liabilities. The popular press has published several recommendations to protect pension fund solvency through the immunisation of liabilities. Recommendations have ranged from the approach of the Boots Pension fund, which ...
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Features
Greek asset law expected soon
New legislation due to be passed in Greece later this year is expected to create an open institutional market worth around €33bn to asset managers within three to five years, according to Haris Makkas, CEO of ING Piraeus Asset Management in Athens. There are around €23bn of assets under management, ...
