Archive » 2004 » Issue 18 (March)
Cross-border funds access still limited
02 March, 2004
Europe’s distributors are denying customers access to the full range of
cross-border funds as it is more economical to sell products
manufactured internally.
When a customer enters a bank branch in Europe, how confident can they be of accessing the best funds available?
Deutsche Bank’s Private & Business Clients division believes
customers looking for performance can find what they need. Their due
diligence team narrowed down the funds universe to eight strategic
partners. There are also less high-profile agreements with a plethora
of providers. Now Deutsche’s provision of external funds is being
rolled out through Spain, Italy and Belgium.
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Now Fidelity signs deal with Dutch Postbank
02 March, 2004
Fidelity gains access to 7.5m new customers in a concentrated market.
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Good old days back at Dexia
02 March, 2004
New boss gets go-ahead to favour Ely managers over Dexia.
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Company briefs
02 March, 2004
Insinger issues a word of caution to equity investors
Amsterdam-based private bank Insinger de Beaufort has gone against
the grain with a cautious note to European equity investors. “The
consensus view is built around the fact that interest rates are likely
to rise in the second half of 2004. But the expectation of rate rises
will have more effect on equities than the actual increase,” said Dave
Williams, fund manager at Insinger. Despite this, Insinger prefers
European to US markets. Oil services and equipment stocks are favoured.
Insinger uses funds from Odey Asset Management, JO Hambro Capital
Management and Thames River Capital.
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How L&C; fits into the UBS plan for expansion
02 March, 2004
UBS announced last month its purchase of UK private client investment
manager Laing & Cruickshank Investment Management (L&C;),
marking the Swiss bank’s most significant expansion in Europe to date.
The deal was UBS’s third major wealth management acquisition in the
past nine months. It will also bring the total amount of client assets
bought by the Swiss bank in Europe to E9.5bn since May last year.
Another Ł5bn (e7.5bn) will be added once the buyout of Scott Goodman
Harris (SGH), UK adviser to high net worth individuals, is completed
later this year.
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Behind the headline figures
02 March, 2004
Fund investment, particularly in equity funds, is back – or is it? There’s
more than meets the eye to European developments, as a comparative analysis with the American situation shows. Rodney Williams reports.
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DWS secures roots beyond Deutsche Bank
02 March, 2004
Its products are best-sellers at Deutsche Bank branches despite the
friction of competition from outsiders, but DWS remains keen to expand its European distribution network. Yuri Bender writes about the latest ambitions of the German funds powerhouse.
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Banks remain keen on offshore call centres
02 March, 2004
Independent research shows that customers prefer to deal with a local operator, but, as Roxane McMeeken reports, wealth managers like Fidelity and Investec are standing by their decision to outsource call services.
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‘Low volatility strategies will, when effectively combined, prove a valuable diversifier
of a traditional long-only
portfolio’
Michael Goldman, Pioneer Alternative Investments |
New attitude to low volatility
02 March, 2004
Investors are now better prepared to appreciate the advantages of a
portfolio that mixes in alternative strategies such as hedge funds.
Three years of falling equity prices and the bounce during 2003 have
dramatically strengthened the case for the inclusion of alternative
investments within a traditional portfolio.
“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” This might describe the approach
taken by traditional portfolio managers in the booming equity markets
of the 1990s. But the markets did break, suffering substantial losses
in the first three years of the new millennium. This period of
sustained red ink caused many investors – institutional and retail – to
reconsider their strategies and even to view, with some suspicion, the
highly volatile recovery of 2003 when, for example, the S&P; 500
Index gained 26.38 per cent.
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‘Hedge fund indices serve as a benchmark for
evaluation of individual hedge fund and actively managed FoFs performance’
Oliver Schupp, CSFB Tremont Index |
Appetite for alternatives
02 March, 2004
Among the array of products that has sprouted from the fast-growing
hedge fund universe is the investable index, which, with its specific
criteria for fund selection, widens the asset allocation options for
investors in alternative classes.
Strong growth within the hedge fund industry continues, with the number
of hedge funds rising fivefold in the past decade to amount to more
than 6000 today. Hedge fund assets are now at an estimated high of
$700–750bn worldwide.
The bursting of the technology bubble in 2000 highlighted the
limitations of long-only investing and increased the appetite for
investments that generally exhibit low correlation to equities.
As a result, institutional investors, including pension funds and
endowments, are showing a growing interest in exploring the role of
hedge funds in their strategic asset allocation.
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‘Using block trades
means private individuals may benefit from the
same market access
as traders’ cherished
institutional accounts’
Pierre Lequeux, ABN AMRO Asset
Management Limited |
Currency set to grow from infancy
02 March, 2004
Currency overlay techniques, once the province of pension funds and
other institutions, are fast becoming available to HNWIs seeking
diversification.
Currency management, to the uninitiated, is getting a fistful of
dollars for a handful of euros to spend during a trip to New York, and
using whichever booth at Paris Charles de Gaulle or Roma Leonardo da
Vinci offers the best deal to make the trade. But to the sophisticated
private investor, active currency management is an asset class in its
own right. One, moreover, which not only may offer impressive returns
but is also relatively liquid, reassuringly uncorrelated to the major
equity and bond markets, and less market dependent than buy and hold
strategies.
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‘Bonds are bounded in
a way that equities are
not because they redeem
at fixed price, or, in the
event of default, subside
to some lower value’
Tim Haywood, Julius Baer Investments Ltd |
Upsides and downsides of a bond-based opportunity
02 March, 2004
Despite the investment world’s ongoing bias in favour of equity-derived
strategies, there are strong reasons for choosing fixed income hedge
fund strategies instead. Here are five of the best such reasons.
All the pieces are in place today for explosive growth in fixed income
hedge funds, yet this remains a minority strategy compared to, for
example, equity-derived hedge fund strategies. Of the 585 funds listed
in September 2003’s Eurohedge league tables, 325 are pure equity funds,
yet just 83 are pure bond funds.
This partial sample illuminates the equity bias in the world of
alternative investments and is surprising in view of the opportunities.
Here are five reasons why investors should consider fixed income hedge
fund strategies.
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European economies favoured over the US
02 March, 2004
While European equity managers are talking up the abundance of buying
opportunities, their performance can vary significantly, writes Simon
Hildrey.
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Panel Investment
02 March, 2004
Each month in PWM, six top European asset allocators reveal how they
would spend E100,000 in a fund supermarket for a fairly conservative
client with a balanced strategy.
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Portfolio Planning
02 March, 2004
In this section of PWM we test the performance and volatility of
two investment strategies using model portfolios. Each month we look at
two distinct approaches – one global and one European.
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