Investment Strategies – Page 29
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Interviews
From growth to profitability
Arjun Divecha likes to talk personal hygiene. In particular he likes to tell a story about HengAn International, China’s leading producer of sanitary towels and diapers.
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Special Report
Garbage in, garbage out
Like all investment data and ratings, environmental, social and governance indicators need to be scrubbed clean and carefully analysed, writes Adam Seitchik
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Asset Class ReportsEmerging market debt – A reconfiguring world
High credit spreads and strong currency performance are just two reasons why emerging debt markets are set to eclipse the performance of G7 countries in the coming year, writes Peter Marber
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Asset Class Reports
Emerging Market Debt: Portfolio focus: Fringe benefits
As an asset class, emerging market debt (EMD) is generating a real buzz among asset managers and investors. It may take some time, but pension fund allocations are expected to rise, given the mismatch between current allocations to the emerging markets and their increasing economic importance. Insight Investment head of EMD, Colm McDonagh, says: “Less than 1% of global pension fund assets are in emerging markets; it should be significantly higher. Within 10 years, emerging market countries will have 50% of global GDP.”
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Special Report
Fiduciary/Delegation: Your faithful friend?
Liam Kennedy assesses the European market for fiduciary management. Where the earliest fiduciary contracts outsourced almost the entire value chain of pension management, more recent agreements centre on different levels of delegation, and managers are having to learn new tricks
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Special Report
Fiduciary/Delegation: Topiary
Failed by the fund of funds industry, investors are beginning to plant, nurture and clip their hedge funds themselves, finds Martin Steward
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Special Report
Fiduciary/Delegation: Competing advice
The obvious objection to pension funds bringing hedge fund selection in-house is the strain it puts on resources in the service of such a small part of the overall risk budget. The counter-argument, put by Andre Konstantinow, head of manager selection at the Barclays UK Retirement Fund, is that hedge ...
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Special ReportFiduciary/Delegation: Still life in the FoFs model
While relationships with funds of funds are evolving, Katharina Lichtner outlines the costs and dangers of going it alone in private equity
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Asset Class ReportsCredit: New world order
Joseph Mariathasan finds corporate bond managers coping with the new realities around benchmarking, ‘risk-free’ rates and agency credit ratings
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Asset Class Reports
Credit: Graded ‘could do better’
Martin Steward talks to Standard & Poor’s about what exactly it means to rate a security AAA
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Asset Class Reports
Credit: Real yields for real money
Martin Steward speaks to Babson Capital Europe, which argues that the time has come for European pension funds to allocate seriously to the loans market
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Asset Class Reports
Credit: Qualities for the long term
Madeline Forrester makes the case for investing in high yield as part of a longer-term strategy
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Interviews
Munsters targets pension market
Robeco is boosting its efforts to cater to the Dutch pensions industry. This is not a huge surprise, considering the fact that CEO Roderick Munsters joined the asset manager from pension giant APG, Mariska van der Westen and Liam Kennedy write
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Special Report
Local supporter
Nina Röhrbein finds out how the Minneapolis-based Community Reinvestment Fund is helping to funnel capital into distressed urban communities
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Features
Pension funds – future farmers
Pirkko Juntunen records the growing popularity of farmland investment in the developing world
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Features
In the centre of things
Iain Morse finds private equity limited partners in central and eastern Europe hungry for long-term capital
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Interviews
Beware falling knives
The Mudrick Capital Management project was set in motion in 2008 to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – “the largest supply of over-leveraged corporations ever seen” combined with the most severe recession since the 1930s “has kicked off a distressed cycle that will be unprecedented in terms of length and depth of supply”, its website declares.
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Special Report
Fiduciary/Delegation: Hedge fund beta: a cheap core portfolio?
If the trend is towards core-satellite hedge fund portfolios, what does that mean for resource budgeting? It is tempting to see this as a passive-active portfolio – why would an investor not wish to maximise her budget for the active part and minimise her budget for idiosyncratic risk, illiquidity risk and, of course, costs, in the passive part? This is the argument behind ‘hedge fund beta’ – investable indices, ETFs, super-diversified funds of funds and quantitative, hedge fund replicators.
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Special ReportPortfolio Construction: Three Blind Mice
Accounting for fat tails of individual instruments is not the same as managing those tails at portfolio level. Svetlozar (Zari) Rachev and Georgi Mitov explore how advanced copulas might address the problem of fat tails, dependence models and portfolio risk
