All articles by Trevor Cook
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Features
Golden ages and the perfect pension plan
The Golden Age of pensions ended with the bursting of the tech bubble but still the ideal pension these days is a well-funded DB scheme, writes Trevor Cook
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Features
Burying heads in sand
The attitude to hedge funds among most UK pension funds never fails to amaze me. While happily (or at least willingly) accepting the volatility of equities, most trustees seem too frightened to make an investment in hedge funds, claiming that such an investment would be too risky despite the majority ...
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Features
A tricky balancing act
It has been said that one of the most overused words on the UK pension scene over last few years has been found to be ‘crisis’, but that does not mean a crisis does not exist. Indeed the word ‘crisis’ has never seemed more appropriate than at the moment, and ...
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Features
More challenges to come
If they haven’t already, many pension fund investment managers will shortly be considering how to position their funds to meet the challenges of the new year and it certainly looks as though the new year will produce just as many challenges as this year has. It does not look like ...
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Features
Long bond dangers
Surely I can not be the only person concerned at the recent headline in the UK’s Financial Times, ‘UK finds success in a 50-year linker’. The UK government marked a milestone in bond market history in September by raising £1.25bn (e1.8bn) with the sale of the world’s first 50-year inflation-linked ...
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Special Report
Mid-summer madness
There seem to be signs of it all over the place, the only question is where to start. Okay I could start with the usual concerns - Why are long term bond interest rates so low? How low a real yield will investors in index linked bonds accept? Why have ...
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Special Report
Who's for governance?
Corporate governance has been on the agenda for many years, but for most pension schemes the attention has been focused on the governance of the companies in which they invest rather than the governance of the pension fund itself. Now, however, pension schemes and their governing boards are being subject ...
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Features
Who's for commodities
Well, what is an investment in commodities? Why does it seem to be flavour of the month? Certainly, if it is an investment in say the Goldman Sachs Commodities Index it is not necessarily an investment in commodity Prices. When looking at a commodity index investment one must look at ...
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Features
Real estate has proven its worth
It is that time of year again. Numbers have been crunched, figures analysed, reports prepared. Trustees have received information on the year just gone and for most it has not been too bad. In the UK and US, equities outperformed bonds. Okay, in much of continental Europe this was not ...
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Features
Setting a sensible risk budget
Although the subject of Liability Driven Investing now almost seems like old hat, very few funds have actually changed the way they set their investment objectives. A number of commentators have been raising some very interesting questions about whether the majority of pension funds really understand the risks to which ...
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Features
The Anglo-Saxon lesson
I was fascinated by reports of one of the more provocative talks given over the last few weeks was from a former chairman of the UK’s National Association of Pension Funds. Alan Pickering’s speech concerned the future of UK trustees. Given at a European Bond Conference in early April, Pickering, ...
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Features
Law of unintended consequences
It is one of those unwritten rules that whenever governments try to introduce more protection for one group of people someone somewhere suffers and sometimes it turns out to be the very group you tried to protect in the first place. The ‘law of unintended consequence’ has been well illustrated ...
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Features
Currency - the performance conundrum
It is regularly stated that very few people can forecast currency movements, yet currency as an asset class is one that seems more capable than most of delivering reliable and attractive returns. Why this should be would seem a mystery until one is told by people like Neil Record, one ...
