In Depth – Page 36
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Features
No place like homes
Christophe Caspar looks into whether or not European housing is a safe home for fixed income investors
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Features
Vital statistics
Headline numbers may obscure the fact that smarter business models are reversing outflows in the fund of hedge funds industry. Emma Cusworth looks at the trends behind the figures
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Features
Financing the real economy
The credit funds industry is evolving fast to meet the needs of the world’s SMEs. Claudio Bocci and Gianmatteo Guidetti provide a survey of the products on offer
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Features
Sounding boards
Charlotte Valeur argues that fund governance should be improved with more pro-active communication between investors and boards, independent of the investment adviser
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Features
Burmese days
Rachel Fixsen finds mixed views about Burma as an investment destination for European pension funds
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Interviews
Success assured
When Russell Büsst was coaxed from Amundi in 2011 to head Conning’s expansion into Europe, he had three objectives: break even and hit $10bn (€7.38bn) under management within three years; use the firm’s insurance-industry relationships as a platform to build the pan-European business; and balance property-and-casualty (P&C) with life-and-pensions (L&P) assets.
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Features
Bolt the penthouse door
The apparent recovery in the UK and converging spreads in euro-zone bond markets mask deep structural flaws in economies that have seen little genuine reform, argues Eamonn Butler
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Interviews
An artisan with solutions
Where one still finds asset managers attached to banks, the former tend to be junior partners. Not so at William Blair, whose founder always had an ambition both to finance and invest in small growth companies from day one in 1935.
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Features
Inflated expectations
Investors often assume that inflation protection comes as standard with infrastructure investments. Vivian Nicoli warns that it depends on a number of variables and may come at the price of lower expected nominal returns
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Features
Investing in a slow-growth world
Demographic trends probably mean slower economic growth in the developed world. Katherine Davidson argues that a thorough understanding of demographics will be essential for generating alpha in this environment
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Features
Fuelling risk
Investors need to consider the extent to which their portfolios are exposed to rising climate-change risk, writes Mark Nicholls
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Features
Rates of change
Carolyn Tavares argues that the roller-coaster start to 2014, with its disconnect between economic indicators and bond yields, makes the case for holding to strategic, funding level-based de-risking programmes
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Interviews
Performance built on research
Unigestion’s investment principles tell us that it is “not swayed by short-term trends or techniques which are in vogue”. At first glance that might seem a bit rich, considering its reputation for minimum-variance equities – about as “in vogue” as it gets.
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Features
Rates of change
A multi-polar growth and monetary landscape will require a less constrained approach to fixed income, argues Stephen Cohen. Right now emerging markets look like an attractive prospect
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Special Report
Near the cliff edge
Elisabeth Jeffries asks whether investors will be discouraged by an end to specific renewables targets for EU member states
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Interviews
Cautious, Swiss and international
As an institutional manager and provider of institutional-type investment management services to private banks, including within its own group, Pictet Asset Management (PAM) clearly stands apart from the private banking fraternity.
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Interviews
Global expectations
“What makes businesses interesting is how they adapt to a global changing world,” declares John Calamos, founder, chairman, CEO and co-CIO of Calamos Investments. Having set up the firm in 1977, listed it on Nasdaq in 2004 and reached an AUM peak of $49bn (€36bn) in 2007, he is now overseeing a transformation that he intends will take it on a journey from a predominantly US focussed firm to a global fund management company.
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Features
Favour Europe and the euro
Lorenzo Naranjo and Carmen Stefanescu argue that balance of payments and current accounts suggest Europe is strengthening while China weakens
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Features
Rising sun or false dawn?
Daniel Ben-Ami looks back on a year of ‘Abenomics’, and finds optimism in the early hours of a new day for Japan’s economy and markets
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Features
A sovereign story: the Argentine experience
Rani Mina and Mark Stefanini argue that precedents set by the Argentine default experience could well be applied to future sovereign defaults including in the euro-zone
