Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 734
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Features
No almighty black box
There are currently a number of high profile risk assessment services available to the investment management industry. Upon closer examination, few of these appear to be delivering the goods. The basic thrust of each of the services is that a statistical model of risk is calibrated by reference to historic ...
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Features
Down to earth approach
The electricity sector in Spain is among the industries that historically have always provided a benefit to complement the social security pension system for their employees, and Unión Eléctrica Fenosa is no exception. Until 1993, the company itself was responsible for looking after this complementary benefit which was provided directly ...
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Features
An emerging asset class
It’s 20 years since the UK government started issuing index linked bonds, and unlike the fixed rate bond market, the sector has until recently been largely bereft of corporate issuance. That’s changing, as low yields and strong demand from key investors encourages mainstream UK companies to borrow money in index ...
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Features
Benefits of passive TAA rebalancing
The long-term investor has to make many decisions in response to certain problems within the investment process. One of these pertains to the tactical asset allocation (TAA) decision, which is the portfolio’s current deviation from the strategic asset allocation (SAA). This article considers how decisions on deviations from SAA should ...
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Features
'Simple fundamental philoshophy'
One of the largest but most unknown firms in the investment world is BlackRock, admits its founder and chief executive Larry Fink. “This is not something we planned for, but we just do not believe in ‘self-marketing’. Our whole mandate is to achieve acceptance through performance and client service.” The ...
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Features
Battling over the benchmark
One of the most significant and explosive cases of the year got underway at London’s High Court last month. Significant, because the ramifications for the pensions industry are enormous, and explosive because neither side can afford to blink first in a case that could run for up to eight weeks. ...
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Features
Ready for European tour?
The announcement by the €552m VKG-CPM Belgian pension fund for doctors, dentists and pharmacists that it had established a new healthcare sector pension fund, ‘Amonis’, with potential membership of 250,000 employees across the country, was not only one of the most significant in the Belgian pension market in recent times, ...
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Special Report
Added impetus for SRI?
The UK government has announced in its response to the consultation on principles of operation for UK pension schemes proposed by Paul Myners that it will legislate to incorporate the US ERISA principles on shareholder activism into UK law. This would make it a duty for fund managers and pension ...
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Features
The attractions of real estate
UK and other European pension funds are going to have start taking property seriously again. It has taken some time but over the 10 years to 30 September 2001 property has at last overtaken the other main asset classes. With UK equities returning 10.1 % per annum, overseas equities ...
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Features
Tracking the differences
The main marketing problem faced by index-tracking investment managers is the difficulty of differentiating themselves from the competition. Understandably, index-tracking investment management is often regarded as a commodity product and, like most of these products, it is price that matters. For index-trackers, the price is specifically the ongoing management charge ...
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Features
Cutting the cake
When considering how the assets of a pension fund should be split, remember that ancient proverb: “Have your cake and eat it too.” In my view, a pension fund should aim to maximise returns over the long term without taking egregious degrees of risk. If we look at the returns ...
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Features
Stop indexing: go passive
It is nearly four decades since Bill Sharpe’s Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). We think it is time to take his work seriously and to change many of our cherished beliefs on portfolio structures. There are two striking conclusions. First, we should exclude all references to asset categories such as ...
