Sarah Rundell

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Wallach takes long view cross the Mersey

Peter Wallach, head of the United Kingdom’s Merseyside Pension Fund isn’t overly worried about the recent fall in equities. “Markets are being driven by liquidity from central banks; this is more about central banks just needing to reassure investors,” he says. “It is bonds, to our mind, that are over-valued in the medium to long

Paul Marsh: live with low returns

The London Business School’s emeritus professor of finance Paul Marsh admits that you have to be slightly mad to embark on the kind of research detailed in the latest edition of Global Investment Returns Yearbook. This year Marsh and colleagues Elroy Dimson and Mike Staunton – Marsh describes the three of them, pictured below, as

Fewer, bigger funds for UK?

Australia, the US, Canada and Denmark have all done it. Kazakhstan and even Oman are talking about it. Increasingly, public sector pension funds are merging or pooling their assets into fewer bigger schemes. It’s no surprise the debate is gathering momentum in the United Kingdom, ripe for consolidation with a Local Government Pension Fund Scheme

Pushing smart beta further

The rise of smart beta has just got another boost thanks to a study commissioned by Norway’s ministry of finance for its Government Pension Fund Global. It asked index provider MSCI to look into the feasibility of running smart beta strategies for large portfolios. Very few institutions with the size of GPFG’s $400-billion equity portfolio

Irresistible opportunity in Nigeria

The offices of Nigeria’s biggest pension fund manager sit at the end of a quiet side street on Victoria Island, Lagos’s bustling financial capital. Inside Stanbic IBTC’s aptly named Wealth House, indicative of Nigeria’s growing savings culture, a throng of customers jostle to query staff on pension matters. Four flights up, 48-year-old chief executive Demola

The Co-op’s equally split strategy

The United Kingdom’s Co-operative Group, a chain of food, funeral and financial services outlets, markets itself on a popular loyalty scheme whereby customers earn points that are converted into a profit share, or dividend, directly linked to the group’s annual profits. It’s a founding philosophy that can trace its roots back a hundred years and