All IPE articles in November 2005 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Features
Bullring acquisition
Henderson Global Investors’ UK shopping centre fund has purchased a £130m (e192.3m) stake in Birmingham’s The Bullring from Australian insurer AMP Life. In exchange AMP has taken units in the fund, in order to increase its diversification to the UK shopping centre market. AMP Capital Investors believe there is strong ...
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Features
Active returns dominate
ABP Dutch fund ABP - the largest pension fund in Europe with assets of e180bn - has made sweeping changes in the way it runs its portfolio in the last three years. The portion of its equities that was run on an indexed basis - 45-50% - was reduced ...
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Features
Actuaries' split personalities
Once upon a time, actuaries lived in an ivory tower, where they pored over complicated mathematical valuations…and they invariably came up with incontrovertible, well-founded and faultless opinions. They towered above the parties, influenced by no one, not even by their bosses. From time to time they explained to everyone who ...
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Features
Hedge funds - too late again?
Germany introduced an innovative hedge fund regulation on 1 January last year. But German investors, including institutions, have yet to invest significantly in hedge funds, while international institutional investors are increasing their exposure to hedge funds and are even being attracted by German-regulated hedge funds. Are Germans missing the boat ...
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Features
Positive times ahead
After the sharp fall in receipts since the record year 1998, from €66bn then to barely one-third of that in 2003, Spezialfonds suffered a real slump in 2004. The last time that receipts were less than the €3.7bn collected was back in 1985. But the sector was still able to ...
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Features
Smoke alarm at risk
In 1997 Deutsche Bank, the parent of the UK asset manager Morgan Grenfell (now Deutsche Asset Management) paid £220m (e322m) in compensation to clients of funds run by one of Morgan Grenfell’s managers, Peter Young, who had lost money on investments in unlisted companies, The bank was also fined a ...
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Features
Structures for all seasons
The pension fund environment has changed tremendously over the past few years, with long-term objectives tending to be replaced by a shorter-term focus. These changes have been predominantly driven by new accounting standards, evolving regulation and particularly adverse financial markets. The new IAS 19 accounting rules have repositioned corporates’ pension ...
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Features
Does one size fit all?
Blessed with accessible investments worth around £300bn (e 443.2), the UK property market is Europe’s largest, and is also the continent’s most transparent, liquid and diverse. As a result, the market is often the first choice for cross-border investment and so around 15% of it is held by foreign visitors. ...
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Features
Alpha transport - exploiting inefficient markets
Institutional investment portfolios have typically been constructed around a strategic policy portfolio and where investors believed that they could identify managers with skill, they adopted an active strategy to add value relative to that benchmark. Where active management is adopted there are two sources of return – the return attributable ...
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Features
Emerging market debt: a maturing asset class
Investors should consider emerging market debt (EMD) as a key component of a diversified portfolio. Despite various crises during the 1990s, EMD has outperformed versus all other asset classes over the last ten years (see Table 1). And, because the asset class is more closely aligned to other risk assets, ...
