All Alternatives articles – Page 157
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Features
On the rails
The emergence of infrastructure as an asset class has largely been driven by macroeconomic factors, explaining to some extent the varying stages of maturity in different countries. Traditionally governments have facilitated investment in infrastructure either by directly financing and building roads, railways, electricity grids and telephone lines, or by subsidising ...
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Features
PIPE of peace
Few financing structures in recent memory have had the impact of private investments in public equity (PIPEs). Privately negotiated equity or equity-linked securities issued by public companies, PIPEs gained notoriety during the tech boom. Their standing soared and then crashed with the Nasdaq. But these structures have reclaimed some of ...
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Features
A punt on paint
If you’re looking for an example of a sector pension funds should avoid, first impressions suggest fine art is hard to beat. Prices are difficult to predict, pieces can take ages to sell and trading costs and insurance are high. Annual dividends are non-existent, periods move in and out of ...
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Features
Mainstream or not?
The poor performance of major equity markets in recent years and falling bond yields have encouraged greater focus on so-called ‘alternative assets’. Commercial property investment is often conveniently placed in this category, along with private equity and hedge funds. But is such a classification helpful or meaningful? The term ‘alternative’ ...
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Features
A tale of two indices
Are emerging markets currencies a source of pain or pleasure? Looking at MSCI EMF equity index returns, investors might be forgiven for thinking the answer is always ‘pain’. However, the ELMI+ index of currency forward contracts tells a potentially more pleasant story. Given the significant return volatility patterns evident in ...
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Features
Increase your options
The creation of the euro played a bad trick on currency managers. To begin with, currency managers had strong performance and information ratios, and this was managed with only 20 currencies (which given cross hedging gave a fair opportunity set). A number of research studies suggested that the alphas in ...
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Features
New twist to an old idea
After an investor approves an allocation to funds of hedge funds the question arises of which structure to use. For many, the most common form of investment will be through shares in an open-ended company, often set up as a limited liability partnership, or through one of many structured products ...
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Taking a shine to gold
A liquid asset with low correlation with equities and fixed income and negative correlation with the dollar should be relatively easy to sell. Yet funds have shown an almost complete aversion to gold. A raft of new investment products and a sustained educational campaign by the World Gold Council (WGC), ...
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Features
Safe in the forest
Forestry investment has attracted increasing attention in recent years from pension fund managers looking for alternatives to the uncertainty and lower returns experienced with the major asset classes. A key feature of Irish forestry investments has been the steady positive real rate of return, with the lowest volatility of any ...
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Features
Delivering the performance
Most investors recognise that currencies have a large impact on the returns of international and global portfolios. By selecting a multi-currency benchmark, the investor, implicitly or explicitly, makes decisions on a set of underlying assets and on the desired level of embedded currency exposure. There is a need to analyse ...
