In Depth – Page 42

  • Interviews

    Alternatives – with pensions DNA

    February 2012 (Magazine)

    Sometimes a company’s best investments aren’t in businesses or financial markets. When Jack Coates took over management of the pension plan for US forest products firm Weyerhaeuser in 1985, he was returning to full-time work after the company let him pursue a PhD while working part-time in his international treasury position. That investment was to pay off handsomely. His research led him to understand how alternative investments could be relevant to the challenge he saw before the Weyerhaeuser pension plan, which was under-funded and needed to generate higher returns without incurring too much downside volatility.

  • Features

    Going global for inflation

    January 2012 (Magazine)

    In Europe, it seems pricey to buy inflation, whether for liability-hedging or simple wealth preservation. Brendan Maton looks further afield

  • Features

    Sucked in

    January 2012 (Magazine)

    Corporate credit investors are scrambling to get to grips with sovereign exposure as even apparently healthy companies’ bonds succumb to contagion, finds Lynn Strongin Dodds

  • Features

    An historic opportunity

    January 2012 (Magazine)

    Regulatory pressure, changes to the market structure and an ongoing de-leveraging process make the financial sector compelling for bondholders, argue Robert Montague and Satish Pulle

  • Interviews

    Geneva conventions

    January 2012 (Magazine)

    Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, the 215-year-old Geneva-based banking group, is, of course, a family business. It is just happy coincidence that both the father and brother of Hubert Keller, who co-heads the institutional asset management division, Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM) alongside Thierry Lombard, spent parts of their career with the bank: Keller says he never came across it during his years on the sell-side in London, before joining in 2006.

  • Interviews

    Bringing the New World to the Old

    January 2012 (Magazine)

    The third quarter of 2011 was not much fun for Investec Asset Management (Investec AM). 

  • Features

    Cash in the attic

    December 2011 (Magazine)

    Squeezing a return out of cash can expose funds to unexpected risk. But Charlotte Moore suggests that using it for strategic optionality removes the need to take risk in the search for yield

  • Interviews

    Strategic agility

    December 2011 (Magazine)

    Nordic private equity house CapMan does not make things easy on itself. Its mission statement: “To be the best-performing European private equity firm”.

  • Interviews

    New entrant to European fiduciary management

    December 2011 (Magazine)

    Here in Europe, the joke says that British Airways is a pension scheme that owns a few planes. The US equivalent claims that General Motors is a social security fund with a sideline in building Buicks.

  • Features

    (Really) high yields

    November 2011 (Magazine)

    Dramatic repricing has opened up opportunities in high-yield, finds Lynn Strongin Dodds

  • Interviews

    Clear signals in the fog

    November 2011 (Magazine)

    When IPE first spoke with Ian Heslop about the post-crisis refinements that Old Mutual Asset Managers (OMAM) had made to its quantitative equity models, it was June of 2011. The sun was shining – literally, and (for quants) metaphorically, too.

  • Features

    Still as safe as houses?

    October 2011 (Magazine)

    Denmark’s mortgage bonds have never defaulted – in 215 years. Rachel Fixsen reports on why questions are suddenly being asked

  • Interviews

    Happy in its own little world

    October 2011 (Magazine)

    With new funds springing up or existing ones growing, the winds seem to be blowing favourably again for cleantech investments.

  • Interviews

    Focus and flexibility

    October 2011 (Magazine)

    Few can claim to have been investing in emerging markets for 130 years. But Martin Currie & Co was helping to finance the North American railroads in the 1880s, when the US occupied the spot that China occupies today. That pioneering spirit lived on; it made its first Japanese investments in the 1960s, opened an office and a fund in China in 1997, and rolled out its first hedge fund – long/short Japan – in 2000. A new strategy partnership with Singapore’s APS Asset Management looks set to be a leading independent A-share active equity business.

  • Features

    The long and short of it

    September 2011 (Magazine)

    With the deep-value trade over and macroeconomic volatility abundant, Lynn Strongin Dodds assesses the case for absolute return in credit

  • Interviews

    Initiative focused

    September 2011 (Magazine)

    State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) has learnt lessons from the past. Losses incurred during 2007-08 by five of its fixed income funds, which were marketed as conservative strategies, led to lawsuits filed by among others the Houston Police Officers’ Pensions System and Prudential Financial.

  • Interviews

    Setting sail for calmer waters

    September 2011 (Magazine)

    By the time Jeremy Baskin took the helm of AXA Rosenberg, its previous CEO, Stéphane Prunet, had spent 13 months steering the widely-venerated quant house, with great steadfastness, through the worst storm ever to engulf it.

  • Features

    Event horizons

    July 2011 (Magazine)

    Martin Steward finds an unusual corporate event cycle teeing up opportunities for event-driven hedge funds – but not necessarily classic merger arbitrage or distressed debt

  • Interviews

    ‘Adjacency’, or the art of step-by-step

    July 2011 (Magazine)

    It is tempting, just because it is so good at it, to think of the $11bn (€7.8bn) London-based hedge fund manager CQS as a credit specialist. But founder Michael Hintze is keen to emphasise its broader strengths. “We are a big hedge fund, but we do more than simply provide absolute returns in credit,” he says. “Nowadays we are a global multi-strategy, multi-asset management firm providing hedge fund, long only and bespoke solutions for clients.”

  • Interviews

    Across the Gulf… and into the world

    June 2011 (Magazine)

    Limestone Asset Management launched its first fund, the New Europe Socially Responsible fund, in July 2008. Great timing: it was down 47% by December. But, that was 2.6 percentage points better than its benchmark, the Stoxx EU Enlarged Total Market index. And it made quite a comeback: when it ended 2009 up 83.1%, it left the index trailing by 42 percentage points – outperformance which it has built on since.