Fixed-income transitions can cost three or four times as much this year compared to last year due to the credit crisis.
Two private-sector committees created by the President’s Working Group released best practices recommendations for hedge fund investors and managers as part of an effort to increase accountability.
Asset management firms need to develop “outcome investing” strategies, custom-tailored products that combine multiple asset classes and skill sets, which meet specific risk and return goals.
Check out a humorous take on the subprime fallout.
Chriss Street, who re-joined the Orange County (Calif.) Employees Retirement System’s nine-strong board when he was elected county treasurer-tax collector in June 2006, thinks that high-fee alternative investments benefit managers more than their pension fund investors and perceives the alternatives space to be overcrowded.
The next shoe to drop in the subprime crisis may be the re-rating of AAA-rated subprime securities.
Activist hedge funds are not just good at grabbing headlines; they have delivered impressive returns and are effective at achieving corporate change, according to a study by Ivy Asset Management and Columbia Business School.
A group of Colorado county and local pension funds joined forces last month to fight a law that requires all public contracts to contain language stating that the contractor does not employ illegal aliens.
Investors should build portfolios of high-return, high-volatility managers and reduce overall volatility through diversification, according to Byron Wien, chief investment strategist at Pequot Capital Management.
There is a huge gap in the industry for international and global growth strategies and Brian Zeiler, a senior consultant in Callan Associates' Atlanta office, reckons that managers who have sound U.S. growth offerings should develop international and global versions.
Most managers benchmarked to the Standard & Poor's 500 Index have probably failed to deliver returns above inflation over the last seven years, according to Ron Surz, president of PPCA, even though they may have succeeded in adding value above the benchmark.
Investing in real estate is quite expensive these days, but Charles Wurtzebach, cio of Henderson Global Investors' North American Real Estate Group, doesn't expect pension funds to start reducing their allocations anytime soon.
A number of hedge fund managers have had difficulties processing their applications with the Securities and Exchange Commission, lawyers told MML sister publication, Compliance Reporter.
The next generation of money management firms will cater more directly to client needs and will offer both traditional and alternative investment options, according to John Casey, chairman at Casey, Quirk & Associates.
Pension funds are seeking hedge fund managers that possess distinct differences from their competitors, according to consultants.
Private equity could become more transparent and thus even more popular with institutional investors if a discussion between Hamilton Lane and Standard & Poor's about launching a private equity index comes to fruition.
Some of the largest hedge fund allocators are looking beyond a manager's track record by peeling back the layers of operational due diligence.
Energy, U.S. mid-cap and international equity have performed well so far this year, while hedge funds and core U.S. stocks have disappointed.
Corporations with under-funded defined benefit pension plans should consider issuing unsecured debt to close the gap, said Gordon Latter, senior pension strategist at Merrill Lynch.
With a list of un-kept promises going back seven governors, New Jersey's public employees told a task force on Aug. 2 to restore funding to the state pension system and to steer away from any major changes.
The New America Alliance will meet with Texas pension and government officials this month to discuss the lack of involvement by Hispanic businesses in the state's pensions.
Tax shelter laws and more liberal deduction rules have prompted a spike in the number of small businesses setting up defined benefit pension schemes.
Pension funds should invest more of their assets in Treasury bonds and reduce their exposures to investment grade bonds because they don't generate sufficient alpha, said Ron Ryan, chief financial architect at Ryan ALM.
Alternative Investment News, a sister publication of MML, announced the winners of its third annual Hedge Fund Industry Awards at a dinner in New York last Wednesday.
Without a proven track record, emerging managers face an uphill battle trying to win business.
Approximately 80% of employees build higher retirement benefits using a hybrid plan rather than a traditional defined benefit plan of equal cost, according to Bill Sweetnam, principal and chair of the Groom Law Group's Public Policy and Legislation Practice Group.
Charge more to support your growing business or charge less to gather assets?
As several state and corporate pension plans begin establishing emerging manager programs designed to allocate part of their assets to smaller, generally women- or minority-owned managers, those same managers are grappling with the question of what to do once they are too big for these programs but still too small to compete with the large firms in the industry.
Emerging managers and plan sponsors grappled over the issue of direct investments versus manager-of-managers programs at the conference.
While the Treasury's announcement that it plans to revive the 30-year bond has been well received by the industry, the minimal supply is only a "drop in the bucket" compared to the demand, according to Gordon Latter, senior pensions strategist at Merrill Lynch.
Pension plan committee structure is a major hurdle to a plan's ability to achieve superior performance, according to a report from Fund Evaluation Group.
Merrill Lynch has predicted that pension funding reform, if enacted, could cause corporate pension funds to shift 12-15% of their assets--$215-270 billion--to bonds out of equity as they seek to match liabilities.
Real assets, including timberland and commodities, are being touted by Senior Consultant John West at Wurts & Associates as a viable option for mid-sized pension plans.
Energy stocks blew the U.S. equity market away last month, while value stocks continued to dominate the market, beating core and growth investments in all sectors.
New York State Senator Efrain Gonzalez is determined to increase the use of Hispanic-owned money managers by Gotham's pension funds.
Fund Evaluation Group expects institutional investors to increasingly use exchange-traded funds as a cheaper alternative to mainstream active management.
The American Benefits Council issued a report on Feb. 17 which proposed that pension funds use a four-year weighted average long-term investment grade corporate bond rate to calculate pension liabilities.
With Congress preparing to consider long-term changes to pension funding rules as temporary rules are set to expire at the end of this year, Mercer Human Resource Consulting has designed a proposal to enhance retirement security and produces more stable, predictable employer contributions.
Firms that provide bundled defined benefit and defined contribution services are starting to garner interest from plan sponsors with much larger pools of pension assets.
Merrill Lynch Investment Managers' President and CIO Bob Doll predicts the U.S. Federal budget deficit, trade deficit and current account deficit will all improve this year.
Pension funds and their managers are too obsessed with outperforming market indices, and this can lead to asset allocations that neglect their liabilities, said Ron Ryan, founder of Ryan ALM.
November gave investors a reason for optimism heading into the holidays, as the overall equity market returned over 4.8%, according to a report compiled by Ron Surz, president of consulting firm PPCA in San Clemente, Calif.
The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. should close to new pension guarantees to avoid potential abuse, according to the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, a group of financial services industry experts and academics.
Active managers specializing in investing in specific regions in the EAFE universe generally produced better returns and lower tracking error than their more generalist EAFE manager counterparts, according to InterSec Research Corp. survey that will be published in the coming weeks.
Emerging markets debt funds experienced almost no net inflow of capital in 2003, despite the fact that institutional investors showed strong interest in the asset class, according to research gathered by InterSec, a financial research firm in Stamford, Conn.
Small-cap growth and value managers soared in 2003 thanks to a strong comeback by technology sector stocks, according to data compiled by InvestorForce.