In Defence of Life-cycle Strategies Asset Owners, Chief Investment Officers, Innovation, Retirement Australian Catholic Super CIO Michael Block addresses some of the criticism of life-cycle strategies and argues that we should take a closer look at the concept behind it. “To always place a member who is 20 years old with a 60-year old member in the same strategy is clearly ridiculous,” he says. Read More
No Data Lakes Please! Factors, Quant & Systematic, Innovation Gideon Smith believes machine learning will offer investors plenty of opportunities to create a special sauce for their investment process. But if you think it is simply about capturing large amounts of data, then you’ve got it wrong, he says. Read More
Taking Risk Parity In-house at PSERS Asset Allocation & Strategy, Asset Owners, Financial Crisis, Innovation, Women in Finance The US$ 55 billion Pennsylvanian pension fund PSERS embraced risk parity in an effort to address the asset allocation challenges laid bare by turmoil during the global financial crisis. Read More
The Future of Fund Management Innovation As fund managers face increasing cost pressures from governments, regulators and institutional investors alike, the future of this industry might be in engaging directly with the end investors. OpenInvest founder Andrew Varlamos believes technology will be the ultimate enabler of this vision. Read More
Adventures in Crypto Land Editorial, Innovation, Private & Alternative Markets Opinions on the sense of investing in cryptocurrencies are divided, so we decided to run a live experiment and see what a small crypto investment would involve. Read More
APG Sees More Dispersion of Returns Ahead Asset Owners, Equities, Innovation The rise of alternative data sets is likely to create a wider dispersion of investors’ returns as the wide range of available data will lead investors to take more varying approaches than they have done so in the past, according to APG Asset Management. Read More
Fintech – Beyond the Buzzwords Asset Allocation & Strategy, Innovation Despite all the hype, current developments in Fintech will lead to some pretty significant changes to the investment industry and the global economy, Pranay Gupta says. Read More
February Didn’t Kill Crisis Alpha Financial Crisis, Innovation, Private & Alternative Markets, Women in Finance The Crisis Risk Offset approach to constructing portfolios has gained some popularity in the US in recent years, but the surprising performance of trend-following strategies in February this year led some people to question the approach. Kathryn Kaminski, who coined the term crisis alpha, examines the evidence. Read More
China’s Next Digital Evolution Emerging Markets, Innovation In his new book, Winston Ma describes the next phase of the evolution of China’s digital economy, which will see the merger of online and offline. Read More