A successful tactical bet by the investment team of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas fuelled a heated debate at the April investment committee meeting which concluded with chief investment officer, Britt Harris, dismissing the need for more flexibility in the fund’s policy statement.
Choose your goal posts … and then keep them there
Is the choice between a cap-weighted or fundamental index really going to result in more goals (or alpha), or is it just shifting the posts? It doesn’t really matter what you choose as your benchmark – it is exactly that, a benchmark. A point of reference. But if what you are deciding is the choice of an investment methodology or style, that is an entirely different question.
Security selection beats allocation in return stakes
Can large sophisticated investors beat the market? And possibly more insightfully, how do they beat the market? These questions are explored in a recent ICPM research paper – asset allocation and performance of pension funds. Amanda White spoke to one of the authors, Aleksandar Andonov from Maastricht University.
Investors tell hedge funds to lift their game
Investors want significant improvements in the way hedge funds interact with investors, and have called for greater reporting and transparency in a recently published guide to the industry.
Mercer, Callan courtship augurs more engagements
The recent alliance between Mercer Investment Consulting and Callan Associates to acquire the bulk of Evaluation Associates – the investment consulting arm of Milliman Inc – could be the start of a cooperation that targets other potentially attractive acquisitions in the US industry.
Eigenfactor adjusted covariance matrices
This paper investigates the underlying sources for the biases of optimised portfolios, and identifies special portfolios, termed eigenfactors, that exhibit large systematic biases in the risk forecasts. It shows that the covariance matrix can be adjusted to remove these biases, and that removing eigenfactor biases essentially removes the optimised portfolio biases as well.
