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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Deconstructing Herding

This World Bank policy research paper examines the herding behaviour of pension funds, concluding that funds herd more in assets for which they have less market information and when risk increases. Moreover, herding is more prevalent across funds that narrowly compete with each other.mrec4inarticleinline Sponsored Content scnative1 scnative2 scnative3

Are state public pensions sustainable?

Assuming future state contributions fund the full present value of new benefits, many US state systems will run out of money in 10-20 years. This paper argues the expected shortfalls raise the possibility that the federal government will be faced with a decision whether to bail out states driven to insolvency by their pension programs.mrec4inarticleinline

Dynamic hedging in incomplete markets: a simple solution

Despite much work on hedging in incomplete markets, the literature still lacks tractable dynamic hedges in plausible environments, in this article, Professor Suleyman Basak and Dr Georgy Chabakauri provide a simple solution to this problem.mrec4inarticleinline Sponsored Content scnative1 scnative2 scnative3

Eigenfactor adjusted covariance matrices

This paper investigates the underlying sources for the biases of optimised portfolios, and identifies special portfolios, termed eigenfactors, that exhibit large systematic biases in the risk forecasts. It shows that the covariance matrix can be adjusted to remove these biases, and that removing eigenfactor biases essentially removes the optimised portfolio biases as well. mrec4inarticleinline Sponsored

The new era of infrastructure investing

This collaborative research looks at the constraints preventing institutional investors from taking their theoretical place of prominence in the market for private infrastructure. It offers insight into how institutional investors can establish internal programs, and details about the challenges of direct investment programs. But, it also concludes that funds managers will still have a crucial

Strategic asset allocation for long-term investors

This Netspar research by Hoevenaars, Molenaar, Schotman and Steenkamp studies the effect of parameter uncertainty on the long-run risk of three alternative asset classes: equity, nominal bonds and short-term T-bills.mrec4inarticleinline Sponsored Content scnative1 scnative2 scnative3

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