Alternatives and Liquidity: Will Spending and Capital Calls Eat Your “Modern” Portfolio?

An award for the academic paper with the most relevance to institutional investors, as judged by a panel including the chief investment officers of three large European pension funds, has been awarded to Laurence B Siegel, for his paper “Alternatives and Liquidity: Will Spending and Capital Calls Eat Your ‘Modern’ Portfolio?” published in the Journal of Portfolio Management.

Siegel, who has authored more than 70 articles and one book, Benchmarks and Investment Management, was a previous member of the editorial board of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Journal of Investing.

The inaugural EDHEC Robeco Journal of Portfolio Management Award is awarded to the author of the academic paper
published in the Journal of Portfolio Management in the previous calendar year which, in the opinion of the jury, has had the most relevance for institutional investors.

Siegel’s paper was chosen following a two-stage selection process, firstly involving a panel of academic experts who
drew up a shortlist of potential winning papers, and then a final vote from a jury made up of three chief investment officers from leading European pension funds.

The pension fund representatives on the selection committee were: Johan van der Ende, chief investment officer, PGGM, Frederic Methlow, chief investment officer, AVS-AHV Compensation Fund, and Tom Steenkamp, chief investment officer for asset allocation and research, APG.

Siegel, who is renowned as a “bull”, was appointed as research director of the Research Foundation at the CFA Institute in 2005, he has also served as the director of research in the investment division of the Ford Foundation, and was a former managing director of consulting firm Ibbotson Associates.

Sponsored Content

Part of his (voluntary) role at the Research Foundation was to emphasise research of practical value to investment
professionals, while exploring new and challenging topics that provided a unique perspective.

At the time of his appointment to the CFA’s Research Foundation he said: “Some thoughtful investors have expressed concern that the “glory days” of discovery in finance are in the past, beginning in the 1950s with Harry Markowitz’s work and ending in the 1970s with the Black-Scholes option pricing formula.

“While these founding events are monumentally important, discovery has continued, practical financial innovation
has greatly accelerated, and the direct impact of finance on people’s lives has dramatically increased. The monograph series will both reflect these innovations and try to advance them further.”

He received both his BA and his MBA from the University of Chicago.

His winning paper can be found at http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/abs/10.2469/dig.v39.n2.14

Leave a Comment

Sort content by

CFA to lead industry out of crisis

Protecting the pension system is one of six key themes at the centre of the CFA Institute’s Future of Finance initiative as it aims to empower the investment industry to take leadership in restoring trust. Speaking at the sixty-sixth annual CFA Institute conference in Singapore this week, president and chief executive of the CFA Institute,

Tail risk parity, V 1.0

Just when you thought you were safe, the next reiteration of risk parity has arrived. AllianceBernstein’s tail risk parity takes the concept of risk parity, reallocating assets uniformly according to risk, but it uses tail risk, not volatility, as the core measure. The concept of risk parity is a portfolio diversified according to risk, rather

Retirement: a cause worth working on

There are two things that drive the newly appointed global chief operating officer of State Street Global Advisors, Greg Ehret, in his bid to improve the client experience: the retirement business is a cause worth working on and the clients are the reason the business exists. Ehret was appointed to the new position at SSgA,

Pension funds, where banks no longer go?

There continues to be potential for pension capital appearing where bank lending no longer wants to go. Commentators in the UK and continental Europe have heightened expectations that pension funds will step in to help fill the continent’s bank financing gap. Societe Generale, for instance, recently predicted further “disintermediation” by investors sidestepping banks and looking

Building consensus for investment beliefs at CalPERS

An investment-beliefs workshop for the CalPERS board, held in April, revealed five areas, including active management, where the views of the board and staff lacked consensus. The contentious, or unsettled, topics for discussion were active management, private asset classes, sustainability (environmental, social and governance), investment performance targets and stakeholder considerations. At the board workshop, Janine

Behind PGGM’s ESG index

In 2010 PGGM conducted a study to see if it was possible to reduce the number of companies it invested in from 4000 to 400, based on its environmental, social and governance leanings, and still maintain it’s beta risk/return profile. The idea was that the €133-billion ($174-billion) fund would better know and understand what it

Previous