All Strategically Speaking articles – Page 8
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Interviews
Making an impact on SMEs
The conviction articulated on its website – ‘We believe that market forces and entrepreneurship can be harnessed to do well by doing good’ – hardly distinguishes the £275m (€333m) London-based sustainable growth investor Bridges Ventures (Bridges) from other investors in the environmental, social or governance (ESG) domain. But its investment strategy certainly does.
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Interviews
A new titan in Asian equities
The timing could have been better. Just days before the finalisation of the merger of the Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co and Chuo Mitsui Asset Trust & Banking Co, the latter was fined by Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission (SESC) for an insider trading breach that took place nearly two years ago.
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Interviews
Surviving the seven years of famine
Rogge Global Partners operates out of one of London’s most spectacular offices, the neo-Gothic Sion Hall, its traders toiling beneath the gaze of stained-glass images of heroes of the English Reformation.
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Interviews
On an ambitious journey
The name ‘AXA’ was chosen in the early 1980s, so the story goes, because it can be easily and uniformly pronounced in any language, and, as far as anyone knows, it also doesn’t mean anything rude anywhere around the world. But slick branding can’t make you good at everything, of course.
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Interviews
Alternatives – with pensions DNA
Sometimes a company’s best investments aren’t in businesses or financial markets. When Jack Coates took over management of the pension plan for US forest products firm Weyerhaeuser in 1985, he was returning to full-time work after the company let him pursue a PhD while working part-time in his international treasury position. That investment was to pay off handsomely. His research led him to understand how alternative investments could be relevant to the challenge he saw before the Weyerhaeuser pension plan, which was under-funded and needed to generate higher returns without incurring too much downside volatility.
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Interviews
Geneva conventions
Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, the 215-year-old Geneva-based banking group, is, of course, a family business. It is just happy coincidence that both the father and brother of Hubert Keller, who co-heads the institutional asset management division, Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM) alongside Thierry Lombard, spent parts of their career with the bank: Keller says he never came across it during his years on the sell-side in London, before joining in 2006.
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Interviews
Bringing the New World to the Old
The third quarter of 2011 was not much fun for Investec Asset Management (Investec AM).
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Interviews
New entrant to European fiduciary management
Here in Europe, the joke says that British Airways is a pension scheme that owns a few planes. The US equivalent claims that General Motors is a social security fund with a sideline in building Buicks.
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Interviews
Strategic agility
Nordic private equity house CapMan does not make things easy on itself. Its mission statement: “To be the best-performing European private equity firm”.
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Interviews
Clear signals in the fog
When IPE first spoke with Ian Heslop about the post-crisis refinements that Old Mutual Asset Managers (OMAM) had made to its quantitative equity models, it was June of 2011. The sun was shining – literally, and (for quants) metaphorically, too.
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Interviews
Happy in its own little world
With new funds springing up or existing ones growing, the winds seem to be blowing favourably again for cleantech investments.
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Interviews
Focus and flexibility
Few can claim to have been investing in emerging markets for 130 years. But Martin Currie & Co was helping to finance the North American railroads in the 1880s, when the US occupied the spot that China occupies today. That pioneering spirit lived on; it made its first Japanese investments in the 1960s, opened an office and a fund in China in 1997, and rolled out its first hedge fund – long/short Japan – in 2000. A new strategy partnership with Singapore’s APS Asset Management looks set to be a leading independent A-share active equity business.
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Interviews
Initiative focused
State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) has learnt lessons from the past. Losses incurred during 2007-08 by five of its fixed income funds, which were marketed as conservative strategies, led to lawsuits filed by among others the Houston Police Officers’ Pensions System and Prudential Financial.
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Interviews
Setting sail for calmer waters
By the time Jeremy Baskin took the helm of AXA Rosenberg, its previous CEO, Stéphane Prunet, had spent 13 months steering the widely-venerated quant house, with great steadfastness, through the worst storm ever to engulf it.
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Interviews
‘Adjacency’, or the art of step-by-step
It is tempting, just because it is so good at it, to think of the $11bn (€7.8bn) London-based hedge fund manager CQS as a credit specialist. But founder Michael Hintze is keen to emphasise its broader strengths. “We are a big hedge fund, but we do more than simply provide absolute returns in credit,” he says. “Nowadays we are a global multi-strategy, multi-asset management firm providing hedge fund, long only and bespoke solutions for clients.”
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Interviews
Across the Gulf… and into the world
Limestone Asset Management launched its first fund, the New Europe Socially Responsible fund, in July 2008. Great timing: it was down 47% by December. But, that was 2.6 percentage points better than its benchmark, the Stoxx EU Enlarged Total Market index. And it made quite a comeback: when it ended 2009 up 83.1%, it left the index trailing by 42 percentage points – outperformance which it has built on since.
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Interviews
‘Risk is everything to us’
Asset managers’ products rarely surprise anyone. You’re an equities specialist? You’ll have US, European, UK, emerging markets funds, maybe Japan. Fixed income? I’ll choose from your treasuries, gilts and Eurozone products, investment grade and high yield, maybe local currency emerging markets. There might even be some convertibles tucked away somewhere.
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Interviews
Accent on EM capability
Rudolf Apenbrink, HSBC Global Asset Management’s new EMEA CEO, outlined his firm’s strategy to Liam Kennedy following the integration of its Halbis and Sinopia brands
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Interviews
Five years on
When Peter Wilby begins our conversation by remarking on Stone Harbor Investment Partners’ imminent fifth birthday, it is as if, stepping back, he suddenly realises what a thrill ride it has been.
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Interviews
Breaking the bonds
Last month’s Strategically Speaking looked at how the dynamics of ageing, pension fund decumulation and tighter capital adequacy had influenced Schroders’ transformation from UK equities investor to global multi-asset manager.
