All IPE articles in May 2005 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Features
Revolution at the top
Europe’s largest pension fund, the mighty ABP has turned its approach to investment inside out. The equity portion of the E170bn portfolio that was 75% externally managed just three years ago, is now two-thirds internally managed. The 45% that was on an indexed basis has fallen to zero – the ...
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Features
Z-score's wider ramifications
The Dutch public debate has been dominated the last decade by the theme of the effectiveness of market forces. Applied to the pensions sector the debate has been about whether or not membership of an industry-wide pension fund should be compulsory. If the employer and employee representatives in a sector ...
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Features
A true pioneer
Pioneer Investments is the global asset manager that was created in 2000 when Italian banking group UniCredito acquired the US investment firm Pioneer Group and merged it with its own asset management company, EuroPlus Research and Management. The acquisition gave UniCredito’s asset management arm a global reach, since Pioneer brought ...
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Features
Pay or prerequisite?
Two views of pensions have developed in Europe. One is that a pension, whether provided by government or private sector, is effectively deferred pay. In this view, members of defined benefit (DB) pension schemes exchange pay today for future pensions. In other words, people will accept wages at lower than ...
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Features
Waiting to take over
Finland’s biggest pension funds are using modern and sophisticated systems for tasks such as handling new complex investment instruments, risk analysis and the straight through processing of trades. The integration of systems for efficient cost-effective operations appears to be a common goal. However, there are some funds that take a ...
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Special Report
Uphill in Netherlands
According to the the Dutch Association of Sustainable Investors (VBDO): “Dutch pension funds hardly give any information on how they include social and environmental aspects in their asset management.” The VBDO reported that the total volume of socially responsible investments (SRI) of Dutch pension funds had increased to about 3.3% ...
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Features
Open market regime
A complete opening of the German market as a financial centre for hedge funds (which are now regulated by the German Investment Act (Investmentgesetz)) would not have been possible without modifying framework conditions for investments made by insurance companies, which form by far the largest group of institutional investors. Currently, ...
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Features
A perplexing market
In 1853 a small fleet of five black US navy ships led by USS Powhatan and commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry, anchored at Tokyo Bay and opened up Japan to international trade after 250 years of isolation. A combination of diplomatic finesse backed up by gunboats had transformed the attitudes ...
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Features
Making a splash in pension pooling
There is an increasing amount of interest in the establishment of pension pooling vehicles by multinational organisations seeking to combine their international or European pension investments in a single global or single regional fund. The pooling of pension assets in a single vehicle is an attractive concept as it generates ...
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Features
Simplicity is the key
Commodities are Jim Rogers’ investment passion. As a measure of their neglect by other investors, he puts forward a simple observation: “There are 40,000 mutual funds for stocks and bonds, but you cannot find five mutual funds investing in commodities.” Rogers, a co-founder of the Quantum fund, and best-selling author ...
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Features
International investment tops
A new academic study has found that international investment brings better returns and that the reasons for limiting foreign investing are weak. “Data confirm theory that international investment allows superior investment performance in terms of risk and return,” says E Philip Davis, Professor of Economics and Finance at London’s Brunel ...
