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Investor Profile

Mercer capitalises on manager research

Mercer’s chief investment officer, Russell Clarke, explains how manager research helps create the 200 building blocks of an investment operation that has grown from $20 million a few years ago to $124 billion today and which covers – uniquely – all elements along the fixed income curve.   Starting from scratch in 1996, Melbourne was […]
David RowleyAugust 6, 2014
Opinion

Risk parity – the benefits of a conditional approach

Risk parity is a meaningful and robust approach for building well-diversified portfolios, but it relies on historical volatility estimates, which penalises upside risk as well as downside risk and leads to a massive overweighting of bonds versus equities, even in a low yield environment. The authors from EDHEC Risk-Institute build the case for an alternative […]
Amanda WhiteJuly 31, 2014
Investor Profile

What is the right level of cash?

The $54 billion United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund has adapted to be more dynamic in its asset allocation, a result of lessons learned from the crisis and new stress-testing capabilities. The belief in active management still resonates with the fund beating its 10-year policy objectives. Amanda White spoke to the director of the investment […]
Amanda WhiteJuly 30, 2014
Uncategorised posts

Breaking bad habits: why investors aren’t good at asset allocation

Institutional investors act like momentum investors, chasing returns, even over longer time horizons according to Asset Allocation and Bad Habits, a new research paper that looks at the impact of past returns on asset allocation. The paper commissioned by Rotman-ICPM and authored by Amit Goyal professor at Univeriste de Lausanne, Andrew Ang professor at Columbia Business […]
Amanda WhiteJune 19, 2014
Opinion

Evolution in risk reporting for sophisticated institutional investors

Risk reporting is increasingly regarded by sophisticated investors as an important ingredient in their decision-making process, authors from EDHEC argue that  the effective number of (uncorrelated) bets could be a useful risk indicator to be added to risk reports for equity and policy portfolios. Risk reporting is increasingly regarded by sophisticated investors as an important […]
 May 28, 2014
Opinion

Challenges facing the world’s biggest funds

In the coming weeks, Towers Watson will be writing a series of articles, exclusive to conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com, that look at key challenges facing large asset owners. These will focus on specific practicalities that many global funds are encountering such as the role of internal teams. To put these challenges in context, this first article by global […]
 May 23, 2014
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