Sweden’s Third National Pension Fund, AP3, has rejigged its long-term strategic asset allocation and increased its exposure to alternatives. Kristen Paech talks to chief investment officer Erik Valtonen about the reasons behind the changes.
The peak body for the global hedge fund industry, the Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) has backed a proposal mandating the full transparency and disclosure of ‘stematically significant’ positions and risk exposures held by hedge funds to their national regulators.
At the age of 82, modern portfolio theorist, Harry Markowitz still has a lot to say about the state of play in investment management. In the January/February issue of the Financial Analysts Journal, Makowitz who is president of Harry Markowitz Company and adjunct professor of finance at the Rady School at the University of California, outlines a proposal for gaining insight into complex financial instruments, which includes the government sponsoring a survey of direct and indirect exposures.
Greater US government ownership of Citigroup could bring a dilemma to one of the troubled bank’s major stakeholders, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), according to US financial services consultancy Aite group.
Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), with assets of about US$5 trillion, see Brazil, China and areas of Central America as the most attractive geographical regions for investment, while 70 per cent plan to increase their allocations to equity markets in the second half of the year, according to new research by Financial Dynamics International (FDI).
Pension funds could soon hold bargaining power over funds managers, particularly in the alternative asset classes, with asset management fees predicted to decrease in 2009 and beyond.