Activist Investing

Activist investing is an investment approach whereby an investor seeks to influence the strategy of a company. Strategy may be very broadly defined to include acquisitions, divestitures, capital structure, dividend policy and board composition, inter alia.

We see two broad aspects of this strategy that may exist separately or together. First, activist investing may seek to remedy conflicts of interest in corporate governance. Secondly, it may be seen as a derivative strategy of value investing that attempts not only to identify undervalued companies, but also to engage those companies to pursue actions that will realize shareholder value.

We believe activist strategies should be considered as a part of investors’ equity portfolios.

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GIC, Temasek eye trillions of growth in climate adaptation market

GIC, Temasek eye trillions of growth in climate adaptation market

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.

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The pitfalls of risk modelling

Many portfolio managers use multi-factor models, but these are only as good as the various inputs used to construct them. MSCI looks at how flawed-model construction can result in optimised portfolios that are not efficient. The paper, Is Your Risk Model Letting Your Optimized Portfolio Down?, reveals that faulty risk models tend to underestimate risk

Investors add to credit cycle

Reaching-for-yield — the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields — is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This Harvard Business School finance working paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. The paper’s authors Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina show evidence for reaching for

Low vol strategies
can go global

S&P Dow Jones Indices’ researchers take a closer look at the long-term effectiveness of low volatility strategies in this paper. Aye Soe, S&P’s director of index research and design, analyses the low-volatility effect in the US equity market, with a focus on the common properties of various low-volatility strategies. Drawing from the extensive academic literature

New ways to calculate portfolio weights

This paper presents two simple algorithms to calculate the portfolio weights for a risk parity strategy, where asset class covariance information is appropriately taken into consideration to achieve “true” equal risk contribution. Previous implementations of risk parity either (1) used a naïve 1/vol solution, which ignores asset class correlations, or (2) computed “true” risk parity

OECD investigates
market fragility

In this fourth part of an OECD working paper, researchers look at the potential that portfolio rebalancing by financial investors can contribute to spreading financial turmoil in a major market event such as the global financial crisis or ensuing sovereign debt crisis in Europe. In International Capital Mobility and Financial Fragility – Part 4: Which Structural

How to find a safe haven in Europe

MSCI looks at how equity investors can find European stocks that offer some protection against the current volatility buffering markets. Zoltán Nagy and Oleg Ruban examine how the Barra Europe Equity model (EUE3) can be used to help identify stocks that are less sensitive to the unfavorable movements in troubled countries. Using the covariance matrix

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