All Securities Services articles – Page 18
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Features
Keeping in with the rating agencies
For companies that depend on the bond markets for financing, the importance of their credit rating cannot be overstated. A satisfactory credit rating in this context means at least single A (the lowest ‘investment grade’ rating) but many issuers aim to achieve AA and a few are AAA. The choice ...
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Special Report
A question of best practice
For trustees and board members of pension funds in Europe, life has never been harder. A decade ago, things looked rosy. Pension funds were in surplus, and funding levels were not a concern. Pension schemes were posting strong double digit returns, allowing contribution holidays, and spending almost next to no ...
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Features
Block trading: horses for courses
One component of transition management that has grown in importance is block trading. As its name implies, this involves the trading of large blocks of shares between institutions. Historically, the problem with block trading is that there is no wholesale market for shares. Large institutional investors trade in the same ...
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Features
The power of the 'case method'
If you felt some tremors on 25 October, the cause may have been the animated debate at the University of Toronto’s Rotman school of management about the right financial policies for the Public Sector Employee Retirement System (PERS). The participants in the debate were the 55 attendees to a colloquium ...
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Features
Why custody is no commodity
What is the real cost or benefit of custody activities and how can you work with your custodian, or perhaps fund managers, to improve the bottom line? Custody activities have been often criticised as opaque. Perhaps the arrangements were only reviewed once every three years or more. Not only was ...
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Features
De-risking the pension scheme
In recent years, corporate sponsors of pension schemes have found themselves in a constantly changing environment. Defined benefit pension commitments are now recognised as a major source of financial risk for most global businesses and companies realise that their credit ratings and their ability to finance themselves are likely to ...
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Features
Global players home in
There is an air of eager anticipation among global custodians when it comes to providing services in central and eastern Europe. Interest in the region has been steadily building over the past few years and the accession of countries including Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the EU ...
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Features
Telling it how it is
Client reporting has improved greatly in recent years. Fund managers now produce reports that are almost as slick as those of management consultants. Most pension trustees and officers seem to be happier with what they receive today compared with five or 10 years ago. Standards had to be raised. It ...
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Features
The makings of a winner
Year-end prognostications about the evolution of the securities services product set are always an ill-advised enterprise – after all, it was only after the fourth year of commentators touting it as the next big thing that outsourcing finally deigned to take off as ‘predicted’. However, if I were a betting ...
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Features
Without a ripple
One of the largest pension funds for professionals in the Netherlands, the Doctors Pensions Fund Services (DPFS), recently outsourced the management of its assets from its in-house investment management team to external asset managers. The transfer which involved the movement of €11bn of DPFS assets, was probably the largest transition ...
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Features
Negative times here again
Against a backdrop of lacklustre performance in almost all markets (eg, stocks, bonds and commodities), and more generally, of a decline in the risk appetite of investors, all hedge fund strategies performed negatively in October, for the first time since April. Unsurprisingly, the strategies most harshly hit by the fall ...
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Features
Difficult to apply
Behavioural finance achieved real respectability three years ago when Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in this area. Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky are best known for their work on Prospect Theory. A simple rendering of this theory would be that people have an irrational tendency ...
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Features
Outsourcing maestro axed
The sudden removal of veteran executive Ramy Bourgi and head of securities Neil Henderson from their posts at JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services (WSS) was perhaps inevitable following the long telegraphed collapse of the custodian’s flagship outsourcing arrangement with Schroders Investment Management. That said, given the retirement of Tom Swayne, head ...
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Features
Behind the curve
September was a good month for funds of funds all round, with the Eurekahedge indices returning upwards of 1% across almost all strategies and regions. The month saw a departure (positive) from August’s shallower returns, and a return to the more robust pre-August rising trend. The Eurekahedge Global Fund of ...
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Features
Hidden costs of trading revealed
Most trustees have no problem in seeing why investment performance must be monitored. The success or failure of the entire fund is at stake. But when it comes to putting transaction costs under the microscope, the exercise can sometimes seem too arcane to bother with. Still, many pension funds are ...
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Features
Early retirement trend slows
Europe seems to be slowly inching away from its early retirement tendencies, according to the latest data on pensions expenditure issued by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical bureau. The release of this data coincides with the publication of a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which calls ...
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Features
Fishing in a lively pond
For Freud it was ‘id’. For investors, should it be ‘mid’? Yes. Mid caps are under-researched and under-owned, which makes them fertile ground for stockpickers. The availability of information in this area of the market is poor. So there is good potential to benefit from identifying positive change in companies ...
