Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 687
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Features
Factors in global equity success
Experience and a pragmatic approach are the critical factors in boosting relative performance for global equity managers according to the latest analysis of offshore based funds, published by Standard & Poor’s Fund Research. In the current bear market, few global equities fund managers have experienced such a protracted recession. Long ...
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Features
Resilient in adversity
Passive management has had its fair share of knockers in the last few months. Consider the recent assertion by Paul Woolley, chairman of fund manager GMO Woolley, that passive investment may be popular, but that it is undermining equity returns and promoting market bubbles and implosions. Woolley argued that by ...
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Features
Foundation of future strategies
The growth of securities indexing has been one of the most significant investment trends over the past decade. In times of bear markets its value is regularly questioned, but indexation has an established place in institutional investment and continues to develop as a tool for investors. So what has been ...
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Features
Getting a grip on markets
Rick Lacaille, head of the structured product group at State Street Global Advisors is optimistic about the long-term growth prospects for indexing across the Europe – despite the current market turmoil. For Lacaille, the gradual shift by European pension funds from fixed income into equity is part of the same ...
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Features
Bonds - suitable case for treatment
With many active bond managers failing to outperform their clients’ benchmarks over the last few years, indexing, or passively managing bond portfolios is becoming an increasingly popular alternative for plan sponsors. A passive strategy is defined as one that strives to match the return of the portfolio to a given ...
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Features
Limits to indexing
With passive investment on the rise, providers are seeking to make indices out of anything that will fit. Equities are now indexed by sector, sub-sector, region, style and environmental record, and fixed income indices can be tracked successfully by institutional and retail investors alike. Commodities too, can now be held ...
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Features
Value added alternatives to index tracking
As large company growth stocks surged in the late nineties, institutional investors in the US, UK and elsewhere became increasingly disenchanted with traditional active investment managers. This was especially so with those espousing a value style of investing, because they were generally underweighted in these stocks and so underperformed the ...
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Features
Where ETFs fit portfolios
Exchange-traded funds have been one of the success stories of the last decade. These neatly packaged products, which give the performance of an entire index in a single stock, have grown in popularity with retail and institutional investors alike since they came into existence. Like an index fund, they give ...
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Features
Time to pay more for pensions
Occupational pension schemes are currently being buffeted by storms in the equity markets. In particular, companies providing defined benefit (DB) pensions, who enjoyed pension contribution holidays when stock markets were booming, are now faced with shortfalls in their pension fund assets. In the Netherlands, pensioners have set up lobby groups ...
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Features
Equity exposure slow to grow
Although Danish pension funds some years ago began to diversify towards a greater exposure to equities, their portfolios remained bond-oriented. According to data from Nykredit Markets, the overall allocation of the pensions sector in Denmark at the end of June showed little change from that registered during the previous two ...
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Features
Still loyal to the home market
The average pension fund in Finland invested 58% of total assets in Finnish bonds, according to data from Watson Wyatt at the end of 2000. The total exposure of pension fund portfolios to fixed income vehicles represented around 74% of total assets, with the proportion invested in bonds in the ...
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Features
Discussions ahead
Pension reform in France became a key element in this year’s presidential election. The future of the French retirement system was intensively discussed by the social partners, and was one of the hot issues during the electoral campaign. Before the election, opposing candidates Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin publicly clashed ...
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Features
Equities still take second place
Although the percentage of equities in French institutional portfolios has increased during the past few years, fixed income investments still attract the higher proportion of assets. According to figures from Watson Wyatt, at the end of 2000 French investors only allocated around 13% of total assets to equities and just ...
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Features
Slow to start
The pension reform passed in Germany last year was a step in the right direction for the development of private pension provision, even though the market growth expected a year ago hasn’t yet materialised. Most blame the complicated regulatory framework as the main reason Germans have shown little interest in ...
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Features
Bonds still predominate
According to data from Bad Homburg-based Feri Institutional Management, the way German pension funds invested at the end of last year didn’t differ too much from a year early. At the end of 2001 pension assets invested in equities represented 26% of the total, mainly allocated to investments in the ...
