Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 639
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Features
Scherkamp puts the clock back
Europe’s large corporates face some searching questions on their approach to pension provision, in the view of Peter Scherkamp, who recently left Siemens in Munich head of finance strategies and Vorstand of the Siemens Pension Trust to set up his own pensions consulting firm. “Chief financial officers realise that they ...
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Features
Busy times in Belgium
Pensions consultants in Belgium are doing a swift trade. The Belgian parliament approved new legislation on supplementary pension last May. The new law, which takes force in January, is far-reaching, and pension schemes have called in consultants to deal with its implications. “There’s a lot to do, and it affects ...
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Special Report
Accounting rules to hit corporates
It was supposed to be a step forward more transparency in pension fund accounting. Still it is raising more quarrels about what transparency really means and what is the right balance between disclosure to investors and a company’s need to keep costs under control. The new rules issued by the ...
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Features
Swaps 'ideal for pension funds'
Derivatives can enable pension funds to re-shape their asset returns. They can guarantee an upside and protect the downside. Crucially they provide a closer match than bonds to a mature pension fund’s liabilities. The use of derivatives by pension was one of the key themes at Watson Wyatt’s 11th annual ...
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Features
State Street unveils 'virtual pooling'
Global custody group State Street is introducing a ‘virtual’ product for multinational pension fund asset pooling. “This enables pension fund assets to be legally, beneficially and directly owned by the funds participating in the pool,” William Slattery, head of State Street’s business in Ireland, said at the IPE Multi-pensions conference ...
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Features
HSBC 'on a roll'
After years of drift, few would dispute that Global Investor Services, HSBC’s global custody division, is now on something of a roll. The custodian’s ranking as the number one player in R&M Consultants recent UK trustee and depository survey will certainly have come as a welcome fillip to Mike Martin ...
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Features
Bringing the bounce back
Back in the glory days of UK balanced management, Gartmore ranked in the top five managers who contended for practically every piece of pension fund business, while many other asset managers were left out in the cold or having to feed off the crumbs that fell from the golden circle’s ...
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Features
EMTX 'poised for growth boost'
This month Lyxor AM, part of Societe Generale, is due to launch an exchange traded fund that indexed to the new EuroMTS index covering Euro-zone government debt, subject to regulatory approval. This should provide a boost for the index among investors, says Scott Stark, chief executive officer of EuroMTS Index ...
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Features
State Street's confidence in new investor index
The State Street Investor Confidence Index is published at 10am Eastern Time in Boston on the second to last Tuesday of each month. Developed by State Street Associates, the bank’s academic partner, the index is “an unbiased quantitative measure of the investment behaviour of thousands of institutional investors”. The index ...
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Features
Separating out the alpha
Carnegie Asset Management in Copenhagen is focused on one thing and that is global stockpicking. “This probably accounts for 85% of the $4bn (E3.3bn) in assets we have under management,” says Morten Therkildsen, head of sales. About two thirds of assets come from institutional investors. The group, which has operations ...
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Features
UCITS III options for institutions
The arrival of UCITS III has provide some investment houses with the opportunity they have been looking for to package their funds for the European institutional market. Payden & Rygel Global, a UK based global fixed income specialist, has amalgamated its range of eight offshore bond funds into a single ...
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Features
Benchmarking - back to basics
The European pensions industry faces major challenges, some of which will likely lead to significant, if not dramatic, changes. At the broadest level there is growing awareness of the issues raised by long-term demographic trends, especially in those countries where reliance continues to be primarily on the state for retirement ...
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Features
Why ALM still has a role
In a market environment where the funding ratios of pension funds have suffered severely, asset liability management (ALM) is still a very helpful tool in understanding the various ways a pension fund might restructure its financial position and to repair its balance sheet. ALM is still particularly helpful and useful ...
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Features
TAA alpha there for the taking
Fixed asset weightings in a portfolio are not optimal when risk premiums and volatility vary over time. This renders tactical asset allocation (TAA) a useful supplement to strategic asset allocation. The institutional investor considering the investment process for TAA should consider the spillover effects to other parts of the investment ...
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Features
Whose hands on the tiller?
The importance of the asset allocation decision has been highlighted by the market volatility of recent years. This has encompassed phases when both equities and bond have moved in the same direction, albeit at different paces (mid to late 1990s) and the more recent past where performance has diverged radically. ...
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Features
Holy grail - or Pandora's box
Has tactical asset allocation (TAA) disappeared? TAA – taking advantage of short-term anomalies in the relative values of assets – has been significantly eroded in pension fund investment structures. Although it is still present within portfolios at a very modest level. In past times UK pension funds funds chose the ...
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Features
Restoring investor confidence
This month’s Off The Record focuses on financial scandals and asks whether the succession of Enron-type scandals over the past few years has damaged public confidence in the financial system. How serious is the damage, and how much trust has been lost? A recent Harris poll found that 90% of ...
