All Strategically Speaking articles – Page 2
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Interviews
Strategically speaking interview: Jose Minaya, Nuveen
Asset managers with a yield-hungry pension investor as a parent nowadays usually have to diversify their footprint into private markets, often by acquisitions in one form or another.
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Interviews
Strategically speaking interview: Edwin Conway, BlackRock Alternative Investors
Many asset owners focus on the return streams available from private markets investments and the diversification effect of private equity, debt or any of the other flavours available in this sector of the market.
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Interviews
Strategically speaking interview: Sandro Pierri, BNP Paribas Asset Management
Like many of his counterparts at large asset management firms, Sandro Pierri is mindful of how global trends are influencing his clients and the best ways for his firm to address them.
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Features
Strategically speaking interview: Redwheel’s new CEO
Last August, RWC Partner’s chief executive Dan Mannix left the company, and the head of business development, Tord Stallvik took over. Soon afterwards, the company rebranded as Redwheel – RWC was an acronym for Red Wheel Capital.
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Features
Strategically speaking – WTW: Democratising private markets
WTW’s ill-fated merger with Aon, announced at the outset of the pandemic in early March 2020, would have shaken up the corporate insurance brokerage market. It would also have created an outsourced CIO (OCIO) giant to compete with Mercer in terms of delegated assets under management (AUM).
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Features
Strategically speaking: Eyes on the next frontier
“Riddle me this,” asks Yves Choueifaty, founder, president and CIO of French asset manager TOBAM. “Why would 70 people who are not TOBAM employees be at our Paris headquarters today?”
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Features
Strategically speaking – AlbaCore Capital: Alternative credit with pension fund roots
AlbaCore Capital, a Europe-based alternative credit specialist with North American roots, is a fairly rare example of an asset management company that was spun off from a pension fund. David Allen, founder and CIO, established the company in 2016, with a team of European alternative credit specialists that he led from within the $542bn (€366bn) Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
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Features
Strategically speaking: IFM Investors
When IFM Investors and its fellow consortium members cracked open the bubbly last month on their successful bid for Sydney Airport following a third revised offer, it marked a bet on a vigorous and sustained recovery in passenger aviation. After all, airports globally, including Sydney, had come to resemble “parking lots for planes”, in the words of IFM Investors CEO David Neal.
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Interviews
Strategically speaking: Finreon
Established 12 years ago as a spin-off from Switzerland’s renowned University of St Gallen, Finreon is a quant asset management specialist that styles itself as an investment adviser and a think tank. It has recently weighed into the debate on portfolio decarbonisation with a novel solution for listed equities.
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Features
Strategically Speaking: Aviva Investors
Insurance-owned asset managers can be difficult to pigeonhole. Some have forged strong specialisms, often in fixed income, but now also in alternatives like property or niche credit. Others have remained a corporate backwater absorbed by group general-account assets.
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Features
Strategically speaking: Goldman Sachs Asset Management
If you are a pension fund, insurer or sovereign wealth fund and you haven’t heard from Goldman Sachs already, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that they want to talk to you – about a variety of alternative investment opportunities they want to put your way as a potential debt or equity fund investor, co-investor or all three.
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Features
Strategically speaking: Lyxor & Amundi
Lyxor has made a mark over the 20-plus years of its existence, pioneering managed accounts for hedge funds, including the first dedicated institutional managed account platform, that it created for PGGM in 2010.
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Features
Strategically speaking: Hayfin – no hayseed
Europe’s abortive football super league didn’t collapse from want of loan capital this April. It collapsed, instead, because of a catastrophic lack of cultural fit with the ethos of the sport.
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Interviews
Strategically Speaking: Cardano
The central argument of the 2015 documentary ‘Boom, bust, boom’, which features several high-profile experts including Nobel laureates Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller and Daniel Kahneman, is that financial crises are natural events caused by human nature.
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Interviews
Strategically speaking: Allianz Global Investors
Allianz Global Investors (AGI) has long invested in green infrastructure. The market, and the perception of renewable energy for investors in particular, has changed during this time. Investors are ready to engage with renewable energy or cleantech if the underlying technology has a proven track record.
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Features
Strategically Speaking: Capstone Investment Advisors
Last spring’s exceptional market volatility proved the mettle of at least one set of strategies – volatility-focused hedge funds. The CBOE Eurekahedge Tail Risk Hedge Fund index returned a bumper 51.64% in the first three months of 2020 alone against a broad hedge fund market index return of -7.96%, and was up 34.8% for the year.
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Features
Strategically Speaking: Mondrian Investment Partners
Clive Gillmore is a rarity nowadays among asset management CEOs in that he is keen to discuss what he sees as the difficult moral choices embodied in ESG investment
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Features
Strategically Speaking: Hendrik Bartel, TruValue Labs
What makes ESG data providers stand out? For TruValue Labs, the answer is to apply AI and machine learning to thousands of unstructured data sources to enhance ESG investment processes
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Features
Strategically Speaking: BlueBay Asset Management
Nowadays, it seems fair to ask asset managers whether they believe they can fulfil their clients’ needs while at the same time doing their bit to fight COVID-19.
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Interviews
Strategically Speaking: State Street Global Advisors
In the quaint English game of cricket, there exists a concept that provides a good metaphor for the predicament facing the world in 2020.