Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 574
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Features
JP Morgan walks away from FRR mandate
JP Morgan Investment Management, one of the fund managers lined up by the e19.2bn French reserve fund for stand-by mandates, has withdrawn, thereby giving up the chance to run Euro-zone large-cap and US mid-cap equities. The fund, the Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), said it would not re-award ...
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Features
Merger brings sadness at Watsons
Partners at UK-based consulting firm Watson Wyatt LLP are sad over its plans to merge with its US affiliate, says managing partner Babloo Ramamurthy. Washington-based Watson Wyatt & Co said in January it would buy the Reigate firm for $451m(E338m) in cash and stock. “Many partners are experiencing sadness about ...
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Features
Number one priority
Vladimir Spidla, the EU’s social affairs commissioner, is optimistic when he thinks ahead to tackling Europe’s looming pension crisis. As former minister of labour and social affairs in the Czech Republic, and subsequently the country’s premier, he has considerable experience of state pension reform – and he refuses to see ...
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Features
Heading for a crowded retirement
Bent Nyløkke Jørgensen stood down as chief executive of PKA in Denmark at the end of 2001 and has since carried out a number of tasks, including chairing the Jørgensen committee, a working party to draw up recommendations on pension fund governance for the Danish government What was your ...
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Features
The great alpha hunt
Europe’s pension funds are still reluctant to talk about their strategies in terms of alpha and beta. But there is still a need for pension funds and other large investors to gather all the outperformance that they can. The terms ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ are used to name two investment management ...
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Features
Turning to private markets
The expectation of continuing low returns over the next decade has left investors scrambling for new approaches to asset allocation, desiring to move beyond the horizons of modern portfolio theory and on to the postmodern universe. One stab at defining a postmodern portfolio theory is presented in a recent report ...
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Features
Where the long-run returns lie
Markets are volatile, with much variation in year-to-year returns: we need long time series to make inferences. The periods we examine must be long enough to incorporate the good, the bad and the indifferent times. In this article we provide an update on long-run returns on stocks, bonds, bills, and ...
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Features
Spending risk in the right places
Most pension funds currently use a two-stage process in determining investment strategy. First, they determine their strategic asset allocation (SAA) using asset liability modelling based on the unique liability characteristics of the fund. This creates the allocation to various asset classes known as the policy benchmark. Managers are then appointed ...
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Features
The search for the holy grail
The Capital Asset Pricing Model of financial theory is the root of the Alpha, Beta distinction. This model is shown below: where R is the return from respectively the portfolio and market, alpha and beta the objects of interest and epsilon a residual error term. This is a simple linear ...
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Features
Still waiting for the future
By far the most important development in the Belgian pensions market has been the provisions for industry-wide pension schemes set out in the Vandenbroucke Law which came into effect at the beginning of last year. The main aim of the law – to boost second-pillar pension provision by creating industry-wide ...
