Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 276
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Special Report
Smart beta: Collecting the premiums
Martin Steward spoke to Denmark’s PKA about its pioneering approach to extracting risk and return from equity markets – and beyond
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Special Report
Smart beta: Smart beta's Tower of Babel
Smart beta systematically introduces different risks than those contained in the market portfolio – and yet mandates are still generally benchmarked against the market. Brendan Maton writes about the urgent need for more suitable measures of risk and return
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Special Report
Smart beta: A question of governance
Andrew Ang and Alfred Slager shared the stage at a recent seminar. Martin Steward reports on how the debate has moved from the ‘if’ questions to the ‘how’
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Special Report
Smart beta: Every drop of return
Martin Stewardspoke to the Environment Agency Pension Fund, 2013 IPE Award winner for smart beta, about its adoption of diversity weighting, fundamental indexation and low-volatility strategies
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Special ReportThe smart beta family tree
The range of new forms of ‘beta’ can leave investors bewildered. Martin Steward’s illustrative taxonomy offers a flavour of how these solutions might be categorised and how they relate to one another, and lists the key research papers that first described each methodology.
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Country Report
Belgium: Belgian funds on course
Belgium has doubled occupational pension fund participation in the last 10 years and returns were a healthy 6.7% in 2013, writes Iain Morse
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Country Report
Belgium: A DC future: KBC Pensioenfonds
KBC has introduced a DC pension fund for new members starting from the beginning of 2014 and closed its DB fund. The fund is one of Belgium’s largest pension schemes, founded in 1941 with €1.2bn in assets and 15,500 active members.
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Special Report
Europe’s Pension Consultants: Are fees wasted?
After a recent academic paper raised serious questions about consultants’ competence in manager selection, Gail Moss talks to the industry about the nuances of the research and the defence of their practices
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Special Report
Europe’s Pension Consultants: Talking heads
IPE put some questions to pension consultants and fiduciary managers, here is a selection of their views
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Special Report
Europe’s Pension Consultants: Shifting plates
Liam Kennedy questions Chris Ford about ideas, advice and implementation in a changing consulting industry
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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
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Features
Quarter century of a rising tide
Nina Röhrbein charts the main events, issues and trends of the past 25 years that have influenced the shape of environmental, social and governance investing
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Special Report
Smart beta: Smart investing or smart trading?
There are limited ways to explain the excess returns that smart beta generates over the market portfolio. Martin Steward uncovers a world of contention over which are the most important
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Features
Be honest about the cost
Flood protection is generally reckoned to be a sound investment, given the relatively small outlay compared with the high cost to life and property when water inundates homes, shops and factories. When the British Isles were pounded by the severest storms in living memory in February, attention naturally focused on whether budget constraints had jeopardised flood protection, and whether greater expenditure would be needed to secure communities and prevent future floods.
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Features
Why 7 February didn’t cow the bulls
When ex-Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke mentioned the possibility of ‘tapering’ the bank’s quantitative easing programme back in May 2013, the first market response was somewhat confused.
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Features
Dutch design
The long and winding road of Dutch pension reforms has reached an interesting juncture: will the country stay true to its collective DB past, or turn into DC country?
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Opinion Pieces
The twain shall meet
The figures speak for themselves when it comes to the development of defined contribution (DC) pension assets. Defined benefit (DB) pensions accounted for over 60% of the total assets in Towers Watson’s annual Global Pension Asset Study 10 years ago but that share is now 53% and falling; the annual growth of DC assets was 8.8% over the past 10 years compared with 5% for DB assets.
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Features
Asset allocation was key in 2013
Economic commentators in 2013 often swayed in the wind over the course of the year. Equity markets went from bull to bear, and back to bull again, as emerging markets felt the stinging chaos of capital flows, in both directions.
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Features
Little nests, birds and all that stuff
Keith Ambachtsheer’s ideal pension plan would not concern itself with labels such as defined benefit (DB) or defined contribution (DC) – rather, it would look at outcome and work its way back to a solution enabling such an outcome.
