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The lighter side will be a section of the site which delivers, well, lighter stories. Check back here soon for the first story.

It may still be the right time to allocate to distressed real estate and debt-related strategies as deleveraging continues around the world and capital remains in short supply. But a significant factor likely to impact on portfolios in the medium term, according to US asset consultancy Wurts & Associates, is inflation.

Last week, Professor of Finance at Griffith Business School at Griffith University, Michael E. Drew*, was the only academic invited to present at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Labor Joint-Hearing on target date funds. He writes exclusively for www.top1000funds.com on his submission, which questions the conventional use of age-based approaches to asset allocation, and the implications for pension funds.

Tackling the global social, environmental and economic risks presented by climate change will require one of the biggest public-private partnerships ever seen. Aled Jones, deputy director of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, and convener of the P8 summits, writes for www.top1000funds.com on the role of pension funds in shaping new investment frameworks encompassing climate change.

Editor of the Financial Analysts Journal and chair of Ennis Knupp & Associates, Richard Ennis, believes contemporary asset allocation schemes are becoming unwieldy for many decision makers because of the proliferation and splintering of investment categories, and advocates an approach that relies more on empirical evidence than on assumptions or intuition.

Barry Schachter, research associate with the EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre and director, quantitative resources, Moore Capital Management believes the current crisis is a catalyst for change in the conduct of risk management because it has challenged the efficacy of the existing risk management model, but simply imposing regulation is not the change that’s needed.

In this month’s Financial Analysts Journal, Tyler Cowen professor of economics at George Mason University, Virginia makes sense of the current financial crisis by drawing on some of Fischer Black’s ideas.

In this article, Ed Peters, co-director of global macro at First Quadrant, Ed Peters, examines what markets, or betas, are essential to fully diversitfy a global portfolio, while still achieving long-term goals; and how breadth is often confused with diversification.

While liability-driven investing (LDI) has been gaining in popularity for several years among mainly defined benefit pension plans, the strategy and products are about to get an upgrade in sophistication, according to Russell Investments.

We first published this document in November 2005 during a period of healthy markets and around the peak of the US housing bubble. The main conclusion from the note was that we had just been through an unparalleled period of returns in all asset classes.

America’s 100 largest corporate pension funds haemorrhaged US$95 billion in November alone, the highest monthly losses of 2008, after interest rate cuts and asset losses owing to global financial turmoil.