Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 688
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Features
Finding a place of asset managers
A pervading atmosphere of gloom surrounded Sibos, the annual operations conference of the financial messaging operator Swift, at Geneva in early October. The twin conference themes – resilience and value – did little to stimulate any real debate and the economic downturn had cast a pall over the 250 companies ...
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Features
Unassailable position
The merger between CRESTCo, the UK depository, and Euroclear has once again thrown the spotlight onto the rationalisation of the clearing and settlement infrastructure for European equity and fixed income transactions. For Euroclear – which had already absorbed the French (Sicovam), Dutch (Necigef) and Belgian (CIK) CSDs – it is ...
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Features
Turning down the volume
Pension funds and their consultants are wary of hedge funds, largely because they cannot pigeonhole them into any of the traditional asset classes, and therefore find them difficult to benchmark. As a result, they have tended to approach them through the multi-manager route, rather than directly. By apportioning a mandate ...
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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 ...
