All articles by Pieter Mullen – Page 3
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Features
Over the worst of it?
Today we received seven e-mails and four telephone calls asking for meetings. Over the month we have seen 63 such requests. Times are changing and we see this as another indicator of the worst being over.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Simple train of thought
Yesterday we had an ‘aha’ moment. Our departmental assistant, Maria, wondered why we were all doing so much. “Equities, government bonds, corporate bonds, property, currency, commodities, hedge funds, I don’t know how you keep track all of this.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Job security
Off to Zurich for a day with my colleagues from around Europe. The English talk ‘brainstorming’ and think ‘outside the box’ but we on the continent want to avoid storms.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Art of designer dealing
The team is back from holiday and we look at the equity markets rise. Yet how many months ago were people talking about bath-shaped and U-shaped recoveries?
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Features
Big is not beautiful
I have mixed views about big fund managers merging. It is not obvious what the benefits are for us at Wasserdicht Pensioenfonds. Our consultant has traditionally (and I think mistakenly) recommended big firms simply because they were big. But big to huge to utterly enormous is not a life cycle ...
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Features
Regulatory Risk
Wasserdicht Pensionskasse in Frankfurt invited me to talk to them about risk. ‘You can tell us what you think we should do and what you think best practice should be in terms of risk management. And we have asked an EU regulator to talk to us. You will like him’.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Nelson’s telescope
A phone call from Alan, my Wasserdicht colleague in England. ‘Pieter, we all have been visited by the FSA and it is not good.’ ‘What is not good?’ ‘We have this thing in the UK called ‘governance’ and pension funds are being blamed for not exercising enough of it, and this inaction has helped fuel the financial turmoil and market downturn.’
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Consultants enter tiger’s lair
We had our yearly get-together last week. All the investment directors of Wasserdicht Pension Funds descended on Amsterdam. Yoshi from Tokyo, Hans from Frankfurt, Jim from Boston, Geert from Jo’Burg and Clive from London.
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Special Report
Diary of an Investor: Problems, problems, problems
Problems, Problems, Problems, and this time from the one area that we thought had been relatively immune from the financial chaos, namely custody. Let me be clear; our relationship with our custodian has been good. Their ability to provide standardised reporting and ancillary services is fine, and the matter-of-fact and ...
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Alternative woes
We are evaluating - constantly - our exposure to alternatives. How innocuous that word ‘alternative’ sounds; it does not do justice to the magnitude of actual and potential losses. It is not because opportunities are not there, but it is the continuing outflows that threaten us and our managers. James, ...
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Features
INVESTMENT DIRECTOR’s DIARY
Revolution at Wasserdicht Pension Funds. The whole investment team is debating the targeting of third-party assets. From Brussels to Vienna and Frankfurt to London, our sharpest minds are congregating in Amsterdam to discuss how we would do this. Jean from Bruxelles began proceedings: “We should ask smaller pension funds to ...
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Features
INVESTMENT DIRECTOR’s DIARY
We have been very busy. Managers have been letting us know of our exposures to financials and we have even been discussing the merits of an ex-financials benchmark. The question is where is the bottom to all this mess? Word of advice: do not rely totally on your black-box quant ...
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