All Securities Services articles – Page 22
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Features
Effect of reforms uncertain
Recent reforms of investment and pension laws in Italy could open up the market to foreign investment managers and custodians. Italy has been a relatively closed shop for securities services providers and a strong universal banking model has enabled the local banks to dominate provision of both custody and asset ...
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Features
Independence is driving force
When Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was on the brink of default in 1998, one area of its operations gave no cause for concern - its back office-processing infrastructure. This continued functioning smoothly, and ensured that no payments to creditors were missed and that it did not have to re-state its ...
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Features
Learn to manage demand side
Since the beginning of the last decade, the difference in macro-economic performance between Europe and the US has been striking. With the exception of the very end of the 1990s, the Euro-zone countries have had sub-par growth, while in the US growth has remained solid, except between 2000-2001. If one ...
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Features
Z-score's wider ramifications
The Dutch public debate has been dominated the last decade by the theme of the effectiveness of market forces. Applied to the pensions sector the debate has been about whether or not membership of an industry-wide pension fund should be compulsory. If the employer and employee representatives in a sector ...
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Features
Waiting to take over
Finland’s biggest pension funds are using modern and sophisticated systems for tasks such as handling new complex investment instruments, risk analysis and the straight through processing of trades. The integration of systems for efficient cost-effective operations appears to be a common goal. However, there are some funds that take a ...
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Features
International investment tops
A new academic study has found that international investment brings better returns and that the reasons for limiting foreign investing are weak. “Data confirm theory that international investment allows superior investment performance in terms of risk and return,” says E Philip Davis, Professor of Economics and Finance at London’s Brunel ...
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Features
Hats off time
While a number of commentators, myself included, have been rather unkind to the European Securities Forum (ESF) over the past few years, the organisation has brushed aside its critics and soldiered doggedly on with efforts to bring about the harmonisation and integration of European clearing and settlement processes. So does ...
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Features
Show me the money flows
In just a few years, the business of institutional investment research has gone through seismic shifts. These shifts have been prompted in part by the exposure of tainted recommendations and conflicts of interest among research analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases, analysts were not only expected ...
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Features
The eternal triangle
The pension problem is simple: a question of assets, liabilities and the difference between them - an asset or liability. Risk is mostly simply and generally defined as the rate of change of an object. The rate of change of an asset’s value, its risk, we know by the term ...
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Features
Tide running custodians' way
Regulatory changes – so often the bane of a custody bank’s life – are proving to be a boon for foreign custodians in Germany. A raft of securities industry reforms made over the past few years are opening up what for many years has been a relatively closed market. Recent ...
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Features
Tapping sources of alpha
The total investment return from an asset portfolio can be divided into two components: q Alpha – the return from taking active risk (ie, not mirroring the market or a proxy thereof, such as an index); and q Beta – the return from taking on exposure to market risk. It ...
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Features
Trend to direct accounts
A clear trend emerges from the research by SüdProjekt that directly held portfolios as used in Anglo Saxon markets by investors will become more frequent in 2005 in Germany. Just over half of investors surveyed covering 45 institutions with assets over E700bn, will allocate more assets here, almost 30% significantly ...
