Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 578
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Features
Clwyd strikes the right risk/return balance
Clwyd Pension Fund, currently valued at £611m (e884m), is one of a growing number of local government pension funds in the UK that have made substantial allocations to alternative investments. Alternatives now represent 22% of the fund’s total portfolio. Of this 4% is allocated to currency funds, 4% to private ...
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Features
Taking centre stage in Europe
With the new year, the rewriting of the rules governing the single currency takes centre stage in the pension debate, with a number of member states clamouring that they should be given more time to get their public pension systems in order. Also, the European Parliamentary Pension Forum (EPPF), initially ...
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Features
Separate alpha from beta
Many of the pension and asset management industry’s leading figures gathered at the Institutional Fund Management conference in Geneva in February to discuss key topics, including how to pursue alpha, the structure of trustee boards, and the best way to ‘work’ your assets. Mark Anson, chief investment officer for the ...
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Features
Real estate attractions explored
Delegates to the first IPE Real Estate European Investor Forum, held in Barcelona last month, gathered to hear some of the leading lights of the real estate industry talk about current issues, global real estate markets and the investment options open to pension funds. The one-day event was organised by ...
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Features
Reality of funds moves closer
Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German empire and ‘founder’ of the social security system in the second half of the 19th century, used to compare laws to sausages because for both he said: “It is better not to see them being made.” In today’s political and regulatory environment, ...
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Features
New solutions to old problems
Pension professionals have long known about the existence of the duration mismatch being run in most funded pension schemes. This problem has been ignored for various reasons, including an historic lack of hedging instruments, uncertainty in valuation of long-term liabilities and buoyant equity markets. The duration mismatch risk is simply ...
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Features
Heading for a crowded retirement
What was your first full-time job – and do you remember what you were paid at the time? My first job, in 1966, after I graduated in law from the University of Copenhagen and completed my military service was in the education ministry working on higher education planning. It was ...
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Features
It's a question of returns
There is some acceptance among pension funds in Europe that tactical asset allocation (TAA) – today’s version of it, at least – can top up their investment returns. But it is only in the Netherlands that TAA is widely used and spoken about. TAA, which can either be done by ...
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Features
Hedge funds by another name
According to Mercer’s study of UK pension fund asset allocation, tactical asset allocation (TAA) is also anticipated to become more popular, with the proportion of schemes using TAA expected to rise from 3% in 2004 to as much as 10% this year. David Tucker, of the UK arm of Australian ...
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Features
Looking at the dynamics
While the message is gradually getting through that tactical asset allocation (TAA) has evolved and improved since the early 1990s, consultants say this new investment method has yet to prove itself in the long term. Andrew Kirton, UK investment consulting practice leader at Mercer says TAA is back on the ...
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Features
A place for equities
IPE asked three pension funds in three countries – the Slovakia, Denmark and Germany – the same question: ‘Equities are still the only asset class that can provide the returns that pension funds need to reduce their deficits – or are they?’ Here are their answers Gabriel Hinzeller is ...
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Features
On fait des progrès
New energy, new sophistication and, not least, new money. France is gradually shedding its image as a land of relatively limited opportunity for institutional asset managers. This gathered pace last year with the issue of mandates worth E16bn by the Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), the first of ...
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Features
Custody market on the move
If the past few months are anything to go by, the French securities services market should prove to be one to watch this year. The large domestic players and overseas banks are positioning themselves to take advantage of what they regard as a market of significant potential growth. In December ...
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Features
Tectonic shifts in benefits landscape
A recent global survey of multinationals’ management of employee benefits programmes conducted by Towers Perrin*, revealed two consistent motivations: a desire to control costs and a need to manage risk. If innate good practice was not driving companies in this direction, regulators have now wrenched the steering wheel and opened ...
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Features
Going global top down
European pension funds looking to invest in global equities may feel that they are limited to investment managers at the micro, stock-picking level, since equity markets at the macro, country and sector level are expected to converge. Payden & Rygel is challenging this assumption with the launch of a global ...
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Features
Infrastructure's class act
For pension funds the attraction of investing in infrastructure projects – roads bridges and airports – is that they can provide stable long-term returns and a good match for long-dated liabilities. However the drawback is that few pension funds have the expertise to assess the risk and returns of individual ...
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Features
Why absolute returns rule
In a bear market, investment managers pursuing relative returns strategies can offer their clients both good news and bad. The bad news is that they have lost money. The good news is that they have not lost as much money as everyone else. Managers implementing absolute return strategies, however, can ...
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Features
Looking for the sweet spot
Sometimes what appears to be a creeping change can turn out to be the forerunner of a seismic shift and that may be the case for what is happening in global bond mandates. Richard Wohanka, CEO of Fortis Investments and with a bond background himself describes the situation: “In the ...
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Features
Risk analysis vital for success
The current level of underfunding of corporate defined benefit (DB) pension plans has raised awareness of the risks inherent in the plans – risk to plan members in the case of insolvency, risk to plan sponsors relative to the need to make large contributions, risk to governments (or their agencies) ...
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Features
Extending the golden circle
The pension assets of US multinational Hewlett Packard (HP) – some $5.9bn (e4.6bn) in total (ex-US) at the end of last year – are treated with special care. The backdrop, as can be found elsewhere, is a policy of taking greater control from the centre. The ‘Golden Circle’, the inner ...
