Investment Strategies – Page 15

  • Special Report

    Smart Beta: A smart beta taxonomy

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Daniel Leveau and Des Morris categorise the alternative indexing universe and recommend that investors build diversified, smart-beta portfolios. By focusing on risk and return, they should achieve the desired results

  • Special Report

    Smart Beta: How equal-weighting wins

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Yuliya Plyakha, Raman Uppal and Grigory Vilkov discover a surprising crop of non-systematic alpha generated by the monthly rebalancing process

  • Special Report

    Smart Beta: Debt and demographics

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Investors should look for risk to be compensated by attractive premia. But Christoph Gort argues that market-cap weighted bond indices fail to deliver this. New index methodologies will allow for more efficient global bond investing

  • Special Report

    Pay proposals in the shareholder spring

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Shareholders are beginning to flex their muscles by voting against inflated executive remuneration packages in listed companies, says Nina Röhrbein

  • Features

    Smooth operators

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    The Swiss are taking pains to make their banks as risk-free as possible to ensure client loyalty, finds Iain Morse

  • Asset Class Reports

    US Equities: Squeezing the last drops

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    US corporate margins have expanded impressively since the crisis. Joseph Mariathasan asks where the next wave of growth is going to come from

  • Features

    Restless continent

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Africa is set for a busy year of elections – and it has already experienced an old-fashioned coup. Charlotte Adlung assesses the political risks behind the investment opportunities

  • Special Report

    Smart Beta: New generation of choices

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    The ‘smart beta’ revolution is taking investors from one ‘passive’ solution – the cap-weighted index – to many. Rachel Fixsen looks at the questions this raises

  • Special Report

    Smart Beta: Re-balance of payments

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Market-cap equity indices have come in for stiff criticism over recent years, but Martin Steward finds their shortcomings are nothing compared with the bond market. A new breed of indices attempts to address their worst failings

  • Interviews

    De-leveraging, beautiful and beastly

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha is famed as the world’s largest hedge fund, earning $13.8bn for investors in 2011 alone. But today, over coffee in a luxury London hotel, the focus for Bob Prince, co-chief investment officer of the Connecticut-based firm, is on a beta strategy called ‘risk parity’.

  • Features

    Avoiding the shadows

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    Iain Morse reports on the growing use of real-time collateral management

  • Interviews

    On avoiding hostages to fortune

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    There is no disputing Northern Trust’s powerhouse status in global custody and asset servicing in Europe. In the UK alone, a big custody contract was renewed by the London Borough of Hillingdon’s pension scheme in 2012, and, along with several similar renewals, it added €19.5bn in custody assets for 13 new clients during 2011, including major names such as the Lothian Pension Fund, the Lancashire County Council Pension Scheme and the Superannuation Arrangements of the University of London (SAUL). Transition management mandates were won from the likes of the Northumberland County Council and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea pension funds. Losses – such as the East Riding Pension Fund custody mandate that went to State Street – were rare exceptions in the effort to remain a go-to service provider.

  • Features

    Boarding time approaches

    June 2012 (Magazine)

    For liquid investors with an eye on the medium term, investing in the maritime industry could be just the ticket, argues Marcel C. Saucy

  • Asset Class Reports

    Private Equity: Pioneering spirit

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    In frontier markets, private equity is often the first source of investment for business. However, as Joseph Mariathasan reports, there are pitfalls as well as the opportunities

  • Asset Class Reports

    Private Equity: Harvesting illiquidity premia

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    Private equity outperforms public equity – not least thanks to its illiquidity premium. But, as Cyril Demaria writes, using public equity as a benchmark for valuation can make it difficult to harvest this benefit

  • Asset Class Reports

    Private Equity: Escaping the crowd

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    Overview Supplying the mid-market Joseph Mariathasan finds a changing environment altering how established managers approach the market – which in turn alters the market itself

  • Asset Class Reports

    Private Equity: ‘If you can’t meet demand, you’re finished’

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    Martin Steward meets Silk Invest, feeding Africa one investment at a time

  • Features

    Private assets on public markets

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    Listed private equity struggles to drum up interest even from private investors. Anthony Harrington asks, does it have any role to play in institutional portfolios?

  • Special Report

    Moves in microfinance

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    Despite suffering some negative perceptions, the asset class is cleaning up its act and gaining new fans, says Nina Röhrbein

  • Interviews

    Making an impact on SMEs

    May 2012 (Magazine)

    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.