All Securities Services articles – Page 16
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Features
Porting alpha via hedge indices
To understand the concept, firstly ‘alpha’ has to be defined. Alpha is a return that is unsystematic and uncorrelated to a general market direction and risk, whereas beta is a systematic and market related return. The most important question is, what is ‘general market’? Do we only talk about overall ...
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Features
Land of opportunity for custodians
With a large base of unfunded pension liabilities, global custodians view the German market as one ripe with opportunity. In the past few years, all of the main global custodians have entered the German market, despite an oversupply of local depot banks. “Depot bank and fund administration in Germany in ...
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Features
RBC Dexia's optimism
Monkey fingers, toe-jam football, joo joo eyeballs and walrus gumboots not unsurprisingly failed to put in an appearance, but when Royal Bank of Canada’ s Global Services, its securities services operation and Luxembourg-based Dexia BIL announced last summer that they were to come together to form a new joint venture, ...
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Features
Custodians face global challenge
With assets under management of €814bn (according to the Lipper pan-European fund flows report of November 2005), France is the second largest funds market in Europe behind Luxembourg. France holds just over 19% market share, behind Luxembourg’s 28% but ahead of the UK on 11%. The funds industry in France ...
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Features
RBC Dexia tops R&M custody survey
RBC Dexia Services has topped the latest poll of custody providers organised by R&M Consultants. The new venture, formed at the beginning of this year, retained the top spot held by RBC Global Services, R&M’s 14th annual survey found. “RBC Dexia Investor Services is very pleased to have been ranked ...
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Features
A time for specialists
Global custody may today enjoy a far higher profile than was once the case, but it will nonetheless strike some as incongruous to talk about ‘superstars’ in connection with the often prosaic business of securities servicing. But such rare and fabulous creatures do nonetheless exist, and few would dispute that ...
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Features
Alchemy to the rescue?
Portable alpha offers pension funds the investment equivalent of alchemy – transmuting non-performing into performing assets. Using swaps or futures contracts - a process known as equitisation - funds can transfer or ‘port’ the alpha generated by one asset class to other asset classes in their portfolio. In this way, ...
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Features
Allocation helps double returns
The median Belgian pension fund posted a return of +16.9% over the year 2005, according to Mercer’s Pension Investment Performance Service (PIPS) survey. This figure exceeds the averasge return posted by Belgian Association of Pension Funds of 15.1%. This excellent result is attributable to the strong performance of equity markets. ...
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Features
Applying an objective view
One of the reasons that portable alpha has yet to be adopted by pension funds may be that it does not appear to meet their needs. Although it is conceptually attractive, its seems to have no practical application. Ronald Ryan, founder and CEO of US-based Ryan Asset Liability Management believes ...
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Features
Bond managers: can they predict?
Although we have seen quite a bit of research on the usefulness of equity analyst’s buy and sell recommendations for individual shares, far less research has been done that addresses the overall asset class visions of analysts and strategists. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that data providers ...
