Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 284
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Asset Class Reports
Hedge Funds: Bottom-up on the up
Changes in market behaviour have created an alpha-rich environment that is great for stockpickers and dangerous for market-timers, write Joseph Mariathasan and Martin Steward
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Asset Class Reports
Hedge Funds: Small is beautiful, again
Joseph Mariathasan and Martin Steward note that smaller hedge funds are enjoying significant new inflows for the first time since the financial crisis. Where is the money coming from?
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Asset Class Reports
Hedge Funds: Not such black boxes
David Turner looks at how transparency has improved in the hedge fund world, and what pension funds are doing to adapt to all the new information
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Asset Class Reports
Hedge Funds: “We ask investors what they like”
After almost 10 years of talking to hedge fund managers, this is a first. Erich Schlaikjer, co-founder of the Cambridge, UK-based systematic managed futures specialist Cantab Capital, is showing me what his firm’s trading and research systems can do.
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Asset Class Reports
Hedge Funds: Fit for use
Craig Baker sets out six areas for improvement in the institutional fund of hedge funds model
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Features
Corporate bonds go electronic
Amid the ongoing debate about the best market structure for cash credit, Rupert Warmington draws attention to the rapid expansion of electronic trading
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Features
Focus Group: Resistant to change?
Less than half of the 19 investors polled for this month’s Off The Record survey (eight respondents) allocate to hedge fund strategies.
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Features
More buckets
Last month, for the first time, we experimented with a new approach to our monthly international strategy meeting. Video conferencing.
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Asset Class Reports
Hedge Funds: Not just a lion at the gate
Liongate Capital Management understood from day one that hedge fund investing was more what you know than who you know. Ten years later, Martin Steward reports on how this became the institutional mainstream – and where it is going next
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Features
Time to get together?
In an ideal world, pension fund mergers create advantageous economies of investment and administration scale that benefit members, pensioners and sponsors long term. In the real world, pension funds are complicated to merge, not least because social partners often demand that everyone has a seat around the board table.
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Features
The correlation breakdown is secure
You may have heard option traders talk about the ‘volatility smile’. Recent events might add a new term to the traders’ lexicon: the ‘risk-free yield curve smile’.
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Features
African ESG dilemmas
This year’s Principles for Responsible Investment in Person conference in Cape Town, South Africa, focused on two things – ESG issues and Africa.
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Features
Spotlight on money doctors
Holding investment consultants to account is a healthy exercise. And indeed, one recent study on investment consultants’ recommendations has attracted headlines and controversy.
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Features
Denmark narrowly retains global supremacy
Denmark’s pensions supremacy was once again confirmed in October with the publication of the fifth annual Melbourne Mercer Global Pension index.
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Features
Change is afoot in the corridors of Brussels
Not a month goes by now, it seems, without some new major development in EU policy. First came the final reporting guidelines for the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD), published by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in September.
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Features
State of flux continues for Dutch
With the recent announcement of proposals for a “middle way”, Jetta Klijnsma, state secretary at the Ministry of Social Affairs, seemed to have turned the corner in the ongoing debate over the revised financial assessment framework (FTK). The pensions sector has now shown a broad consensus about the new direction.
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Features
Funds to increase infrastructure investment
Nearly two-thirds of pension funds and other institutional investors expect their allocations to infrastructure to increase over the next 18 months, according to a survey by IPE and Stirling Capital Partners.
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Opinion Pieces
ESG 2.0 – let’s get serious
The responsible investment community has done something very important. It has raised awareness that institutional investors who define their job as beating the peer group benchmark are being irresponsible – stewardship responsibilities for the long term are now on the agenda. But the current trading-oriented model of investment is impossible to align with these responsibilities.
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Opinion Pieces
A Lithuanian bottleneck
Yet another Brussels go-slow on IORP II legislative revisions? Yes, but it’s not just rules for occupational pensions. A let’s-put-off-until-tomorrow syndrome is hammering swathes of financial legislation and the Brussels machine is now close to deadlock.
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Opinion Pieces
Activist stances
US public pension funds are slowly recovering from their worst years, 2008-09, when their assets fell to a low of $2.1trn (€1.6trn). In the latest fiscal year ending 30 June 2013, assets increased 8.4%