Over the industry? Change it

The pension and funds management industry is self-serving. There are too many players, there’s too much jargon, too much leakage and too much patting each other on the back. And that’s not just my opinion: the results of a 12-month research project, across 60 countries and more than 3000 investors concur. The research by State … Read more

Handy Sandy:
analysing the hurricane

When Hurricane Sandy descended on the east coast of the United States and headed inland, it forced the closure of all the nation’s financial markets. Christopher Finger and Oleg Ruben at MSCI thought this was important because, although there are plenty of precedents for natural disasters in terms of economic impact, the storm was singular … Read more

Bit of a bubble in the property pool

In a landmark project, the £11-billion ($17.5-billion) Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF), a scheme for 10 local councils and hundreds of small regional employers including schools and charities, will invest in a series of residential housing projects with local authorities. Lauded as a completely new way of funding house building in the city, Manchester council … Read more

Inversion therapy:
the investor as benchmark

The pension and funds management industry needs to redefine performance to an absolute return measure, according to The Influential Investor: How Investor Behaviour is Redefining Performance, a paper that is the result of 12 months of research with more than 3000 investors and investment providers across 68 countries. The report, which sought to uncover the … Read more

Will Christmas be the final blow for Spain’s Social Security Reserve Fund?

The Spanish Social Security Reserve Fund is set to be depleted by another €7 billion ($9.05 billion) before the end of 2012, according to IESE Business School pension expert, Javier Diaz Gimenez. The $90-billion fund has already been asked by the government for $3.8 billion, which is likely to go towards a raise in state … Read more

The procyclicality premium

Moving with business cycles, procyclical stocks have been found to yield higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. William Goetzmann and Akiko and Masahiro Watanabe use 50 years of real GDP growth expectations from economists’ surveys to determine forecasted economic states in order to avoid the effects of econometric forecasting model error. The scholars created a … Read more