In Depth – Page 41
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Features
Boarding time approaches
For liquid investors with an eye on the medium term, investing in the maritime industry could be just the ticket, argues Marcel C. Saucy
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Features
Restless continent
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
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Features
Smooth operators
The Swiss are taking pains to make their banks as risk-free as possible to ensure client loyalty, finds Iain Morse
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Interviews
De-leveraging, beautiful and beastly
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’.
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Interviews
On avoiding hostages to fortune
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.
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Features
Private assets on public markets
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?
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Features
Small is beautiful
Smaller companies make up the vast majority of the economy, are better-aligned with shareholders, more entrepreneurial – and not necessarily young and inexperienced. No wonder they both outperform and diversify large-caps, writes Nick Hamilton
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Features
Political decisions for investors
Helene Williamson outlines the complex process of assessing political risk in emerging markets and warns investors they ignore this risk their peril
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Interviews
Making an impact on SMEs
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.
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Interviews
A new titan in Asian equities
The timing could have been better. Just days before the finalisation of the merger of the Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co and Chuo Mitsui Asset Trust & Banking Co, the latter was fined by Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission (SESC) for an insider trading breach that took place nearly two years ago.
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Features
Low beta, high benefits
The significant outperformance of apparently ‘low-risk’ stocks over time is a well-known ‘anomaly’ in investment theory. Martin Steward asks, if it is an anomaly, won’t it eventually be corrected?
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Features
A nugget of risk reduction
Marcus Grubb summarises a new study of the diversification benefits that gold offers to a euro-based institutional investor
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FeaturesIn defence of pro-cyclicality
Adina Grigoriu asks, is pro-cyclical risk management necessarily a cost – or can it be an unexploited source of performance?
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Interviews
Surviving the seven years of famine
Rogge Global Partners operates out of one of London’s most spectacular offices, the neo-Gothic Sion Hall, its traders toiling beneath the gaze of stained-glass images of heroes of the English Reformation.
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Features
One year later
The Tohoku earthquake of March 2011 was one of the most devastating natural disasters of recent times. Martin Steward asks if it has changed the way investors look at their Japanese equity portfolios
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Features
Keiretsu culture
Japan’s corporate governance culture has been moving, albeit slowly, towards Western models. But Nina Röhrbein finds that the Olympus scandal could lead to some push-back
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Interviews
On an ambitious journey
The name ‘AXA’ was chosen in the early 1980s, so the story goes, because it can be easily and uniformly pronounced in any language, and, as far as anyone knows, it also doesn’t mean anything rude anywhere around the world. But slick branding can’t make you good at everything, of course.
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Features
One step forward, two steps back
Given the problems in Europe, distressed debt would appear to be all the rage, writes Joel Kranc. But waiting out events might prove to be even more lucrative
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Features
The real safe haven?
High yield is priced so keenly it would take a euro-zone break-up to really threaten investors, finds Anthony Harrington
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Features
Back to the real economy
Government and bank debt is the problem, not the solution, writes Christine Johnson. If you want safety, follow the money – to large corporates
