Access to investment smarts and better fee alignment are just some of the benefits institutional investors can gain through their mandates with funds managers, says Craig Baker, global head of manager research with Towers Watson. (more…)

An overweight allocation to domestic bonds has not helped the world’s largest investor in the June quarter, with a massive $42 billion shaved off the assets of the ¥116,802 billion ($1.37 trillion), Government Pension Investment Fund of Japan (GPIF). (more…)

The funds management industry is famous for its navel-gazing. After a crisis, you can just imagine how much of it goes on. But, perhaps, that self-examination may provide more rewards if it starts to actually look at industry taboos rather than accepted practices. (more…)

The liability-hedging portfolio of European pension funds is imprecisely modelled at nearly half of the pension funds as measured in a EDHEC-Risk Institute survey. (more…)

After the damage of the global financial crisis, funds should be submitting themselves for voluntary financial health checks to diagnose vulnerabilities and pinpoint risks, asset consulting firm Mercer says.  (more…)

This paper, by Serge Darolles of Lyxor Asset Management, and Mathieu Vaissie, research associate at EDHEC-Risk Institute,  looks at the performance of funds of hedge funds through the crisis, and introduces a return-based attribution model allowing for the full decomposition of funds of hedge funds’ performance. (more…)