All IPE articles in October 2005 (Magazine)
View all stories from this issue.
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Features
Ringing tone of success
As the bulk of the Greek pension system was mired in mismanagement and overregulation, the country’s incumbent telecoms operator, OTE, has stood out as a beacon of success with a cumulative return since the OTE pension fund started investing in 2002 of 26.37% with returns of 10% in 2003, last ...
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Special Report
Price of taking responsibility
Environmental considerations are set to play an increasingly significant role in investment policy following two major new developments earlier this year. The Kyoto Protocol became a legally binding treaty in February. It aims to slow down global warming by demanding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2% ...
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Features
Pooling - waiting for the waters to stir
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford owns an antique violin called the Messiah. It was made by Stradivarius in 1716 and remained in his family workshop until 1775 when it was sold by his son, Paolo, to an Italian dealer. From there, it passed to a collector, Luigi Tarsio, who used ...
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Features
Patience is the watchword
The €560m Nordurlands Lifeyrissjodur is a pan-industry private pension fund for employees in Iceland’s Northern Province. Its 12,000 members include workers in the fishing and manufacturing industries, as well as the service sectors. The hybrid scheme is biased towards the defined contribution model, although it is obliged to pay a ...
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Features
Seeking new sources of return
The first of its kind, the New Sources of Return Survey for 2005 undertaken by asset manager JP Morgan Asset Management, questioned 125 representatives of 120 of the largest US pension plans. Both corporate and public plans were included, as well as a few non-profit, Taft-Hartley, and other plans. Differences ...
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Features
Three months positive
Despite the poor performance of stock markets (especially the small cap and growth stock segments), hedge funds managed to take advantage of the good performance of bond markets and the rally on the commodity markets to post positive returns for the third month in a row. CTA Global funds achieved ...
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Features
Maltese resurrection
After many years of an exclusively state operated pension system in Malta the occupational scheme seems to be set for a comeback. Company schemes existed in until 1979 but these were replaced by state provision when the government of the day decided that state provision should be good enough for ...
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Features
Moving into mainstream
Emerging market debt (EMD) is an asset class that that encompasses sovereigns and corporates, high yield and investment grade and dollar as well as local currency instruments. Given this complexity, it is no wonder that market attention has only focused on the headline crises that have left deep-rooted prejudices within ...
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Features
Managing liability risk
It is a challenging time for pension funds. In a low-return environment, many are tackling funding shortfalls, and are searching for new ways to generate alpha. In the past, schemes used conventional benchmarking to measure performance and risk. The fallibility of such an approach became obvious after the market downturn, ...
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Features
Staying on top of liabilities
The pension fund of Boots, a UK pharmaceuticals retailer, put liabilities management on the map when it moved its entire portfolio into fixed income securities in 2001. The aim was to achieve closer match between assets and liabilities, thereby removing risk from the sponsoring company’s balance sheet. Few UK pension ...
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Features
Intimate world of private placements
Private placements (PPs) are private as opposed to public securities. In the case of PPs, securities are offered directly to a limited number of investors and are exempt from stock exchange listing or public registration and usually unrated. The most common form of private securities are long-term, fixed-rate debt. These ...
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Features
Infrastructure’s long-term payback
Pension funds are trying to spread their investments across a much wider spectrum of asset classes than in the past. More ‘alternative’ products are being offered on the market to meet the insatiable demand from institutions. One area now attracting increasing attention in Europe is infrastructure investment. The term immediately ...
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Features
Uncertainties spawn hybrids
The shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plan designs has been widely reported in the UK and further a field. However, a ‘pure’ DC scheme is not always possible and, even when it is, it is not always the ideal solution. To what extent are we ...
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Features
More haste, less speed
Worldwide, pension funds have shown an interest in hedge funds as part of a holistic solution to achieve absolute returns. They are perceived as complementing, not competing, with other asset classes. Contrary to media headlines in the recent past, however, pension funds’ allocations will be very small; with less than ...
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Special Report
Model for governance?
IPE asked three pension funds in three countries - in Austria, the Netherlands and Finland - the same question: ‘Is there or should there be a basic European template that could be adopted for pension fund governance or should it be left to national practice?’ Here are their answers: ...
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Features
Land of good intentions
Iceland has a population of only 300,000 and a GDP of €7bn. However, there are around 20 pension funds worth well over a hundred million euros, with the biggest ones worth more than a billion. But private equity as a pension fund asset is still in its early stages, though ...
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Features
Trying to get some space
During the campaign for February’s general election the then-opposition Socialist Party (PS) promised to cut taxes, raise public sector wages and increase pensions. The governing right-of-centre Social Democrat Party (PSD) was offering fiscal stringency. For a majority of the electorate the choice seemed obvious, and PS leader José Sócrates emerged ...
