Strategy Africa: Kenya’s Mobile Frontier
When we first started out in the emerging markets space more than two decades ago, we were in “frontier” territory as we entered markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey and Brazil that were previously closed to foreign (...)
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Strategy Risk factors: taking risk budgeting one step further
An increasing number of pension funds are opting to invest in ‘alternative’ or ‘smart beta’ indices to supplement their passive management activities. Several competing methods currently exist, each with their own objectives. Analysing the risk contribution of each factor by (...)
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Strategy How Smart is ‘Smart Beta’ Investing?
Investors increasingly embrace “smart beta” investing, by which we mean passively following an index in which stock weights are not proportional to their market capitalizations, but based on some alternative weighting scheme. Examples include fundamentally-weighted indices (...)
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Strategy BlackRock: Insurers Face Fixed Income Dilemma
Insurers are likely to re-examine their allocations to fixed income assets in 2013 as continued low interest rates challenge business models and profitability, according to BlackRock’s global insurance industry outlook, “2013: The Year (...)
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Strategy Airports versus toll roads - A novel reversal
Following previous macro shocks – the gulf wars, 9/11, SARs and cyclical major economic downturns – global air traffic has bounced back rapidly in a sharp V-shaped recovery, while toll road volumes followed more of an (...)
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Strategy ESG and climate: When credit becomes sustainable
Those investors who have opted to incorporate ESG and climate issues into their portfolios will emerge from the crisis with even greater faith in their convictions and all the keener to take more action for the future. New investors will undoubtedly soon join the movement to (...)
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Strategy Financial markets in 2016: From the « 3D » to the « 3R », a shift in market paradigm – is it going to last?
Three forces collided at the turn of 2015-2016 to make markets extremely anxious. First, the Fed stuck to its promise to start a tightening cycle in 2015, with an in extremis hike in December 2015. The accompanying “dot plot” priced in four more hikes for (...)
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Strategy Risk factor investing explained
Risk factor investing is growing in popularity, but there’s a risk of getting lost in the factor “zoo”. In this Expert Opinion Thierry Roncalli, Head of Quantitative Research at Lyxor Asset Management, explains the concept of risk factors and distinguishes between facts and (...)
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Strategy Negative real rates likely to be a lasting feature in the Eurozone
According to René Defossez, Strategist at Natixis, it seems reasonable to assume that, to begin with, the European Central Bank will endeavour to keep the 10-year nominal swap as low as possible, which means that the breakeven swap will remain deep in negative territory. (...)
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Strategy Five reasons why special situations outlook is brightening
Special Situations strategies have been under pressure in 2020, both on their event and credit arbitrage books. Due to their long structural market beta, managers have underperformed early this year. They have retraced most but not all they have (...)
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Strategy The University of Texas Investment Management Co. to hold $1 billion in gold bars
The endowment, which oversees funds held by the University of Texas took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion as a hedge against inflation
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Strategy Is Low Volatility investing overcrowded?
One may reasonably argue that the recent flows into the Low Volatility strategies might affect their future performance because of the flow pressure on the prices of the companies that generally are selected by this investment approach. More recently, some market (...)
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Strategy Equities vs. high yield ? The answer becomes clearer…
During the initial phase of the turnaround in high-risk American assets, equities and high yield moved very similarly. In contrast, since mid-2012, equities have been accelerating more quickly, outpacing the credit market by a decent (...)
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Strategy Market setback provides opportunity
There has been a substantial increase in volatility over recent weeks caused by a number of different factors which have significantly impacted investor sentiment. European equities have declined by almost 15% since mid-September and we would like to highlight this setback (...)
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Strategy We have reduced our equity exposure through option strategies
Samir Saadi, Multi-Asset Portfolio Manager of CPR AM explains that he started the year heavily invested in equities to capture the good momentum of this beginning of the year. Convinced that the year would be special, CPR AM introduced optional hedging (...)
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