Singapore’s two largest asset owners, GIC and Temasek, see attractive opportunities in climate adaptation solutions – a relatively underfunded area compared to decarbonisation. The former has already made selective adaptation investments and said the opportunity set across public and private debt and equity could increase to $9 trillion by 2050.
Institutional investors do not act on their own expectations when choosing fund managers, rather their reliance on consultants, and past performance, exacerbates the agency problem in the institutional investment supply chain a new study from Oxford University shows. Using survey data for 1999-2011 the academics analyse the views of plan sponsors on their asset managers,
Investors still rely, to a great extent, on past performance to assess managers’ future performance. Rather than rely on past performance outcomes to predict future results, a new paper, The predictive power of portfolio characteristics, argues that it is possible to improve the ability to predict future long-term success by identifying and measuring selected portfolio characteristics
How much has pension fund governance changed in the past 16 years? Not much! A survey of pension fund governance by Keith Ambachtsheer and John McLaughlin, which asked respondents the same questions in 1997, 2005 and 2014 reveal that the same “sources of excellence shortfall” exist today as they did 16 years ago. Pension fund
The balance between the allocating to the right number of asset classes and over-diversification is a concern for pension fund investment executives and committees. A new paper by professors at the US Air Force Academy examines the relationship between fees of diversifying asset classes and their diversifying benefits. The paper finds that, in many cases,
The literature on how to optimally manage the investments of defined contribution funds is relatively scarce, despite the fact the growth in defined contribution continues to outpace defined benefit funds globally. Now new research from academics at the University of Lausanne demonstrates how to perform an ALM study from a financial prospective for defined contribution
Investors relying on nomenclature of smart beta indexes as an accurate reflection of their factor exposures should take a closer look. New research, using a “factor efficiency ratio”, finds that most smart beta indexes are unable to provide desired factor exposures without taking on substantial unintended exposures. Importantly the paper finds that some smart beta
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