January 2023

Investment Risk Minimization and Optimization of Future Pension Plans

By Peter Vodička Thesis is a collection of three papers with several contributions to the optimisation of future pension plans for the long-term savers while minimising their investment risk. Since pillar aim is to improve the transparency of the pension funding, we develop investment strategies for individual savers which are easy to understand whilst at the same time performing optimally, or near optimally. Furthermore, all investment prospects are communicated in real terms. Principal investment strategy introduced in the thesis is called...

Long-Term Real Dynamic Investment Planning

By Russell J. Gerrard, Munir Hiabu, Jens Perch Nielsen & Peter Vodička When long-term savers plan for retirement they need to know their investment prospects in terms of real income (Merton, 2014). While inflation has traditionally been considered as a complication in financial analysis and financial practise, we obtain enhanced predictability and model fit if the real returns are targeted in conjunction with earnings-by-price minus inflation as predictor. For this latter case, we propose an investment strategy of updating the...

December 2022

Global Public Investor 2022

By OMFIF Most central bank reserves managers are resigned to a period of higher inflation and lower returns, according to a report published today by OMFIF. More than 75% of the central banks surveyed for the 2022 edition of Global Public Investor believe inflation will be sustainably higher or more volatile for a prolonged period. Just 20% of reserves managers think inflation will be transitory. At the same time, central banks believe the new macroeconomic environment will cause their portfolios to suffer....

Can Investors Save the Planet? – NZAMI and Fiduciary Duty

By Tom Gosling & Iain MacNeil Asset manager signatories of the Net Zero Asset Manager Initiative, part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, have committed to investing in line with the Race to Zero goal of limiting global warming to 1.5oC with limited or no overshoot. Given that a recent report from United Nations Environment Programme says that there is “no credible pathway” in place to 1.5oC, we explore the implications for asset managers, as fiduciaries, of investing...

October 2022

Liability Driven Investment and Asset Allocation inspired by JPM LTCMA

By Eddy H. Verbiest A white-box deterministic system simulates long-term LDI cashflows using as input J.P.Morgan Long Term Capital Market Assumptions adapted to make them interest rate dependent. Trading, coupons and dividends provide cashflows to pay liabilities and extract excess cash to stakeholders while maintaining the allocation weights and target lifes. Performance is measured by FixPct: the annually extractable Fixed Percentage of remaining liabilities to run-off to zero. This measure summarizes the interplay of drivers over many decades and allows...

June 2022

Greening Pensions: A Behavioural Perspective

By Alice Farrell, Kristina Londakova, Izzy Brennan, Jake Reynolds & Toby Park Through their pensions, the vast majority of people in the UK are investors, with pension pots collectively amounting to over £2.6 trillion.1 Investing a greater portion of this money sustainably - i.e. in businesses who have positive or neutral impacts on the environment and green technologies – could significantly accelerate our transition to a low-carbon society. While 68% of people say they would like their investments to be responsible...

Financial Literacy, Gender and Investment Choices

By Xin Wen, Zhiming Cheng & Massimiliano Tani Over the past thirty years Chinese households have enjoyed substantive increases in income and savings and witnessed a rapidly developing financial market offering investment choices and risks away from bank deposits – the traditional form of financial investment. We explore whether this evolving landscape has been advantageous to every investor or mainly those with better financial literacy, by focusing on the portfolio decisions of the household head, by gender. Using data from...

LGBT CEOs and stock returns: Diagnosing rainbow ceilings and cliffs

By Savva Shanaev, Arina Skorochodova & Mikhail Vasenin This study is the first to investigate the implications of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender chief executive officers (LGBT CEOs) for stock performance, using an exhaustive sample of 26 LGBT publicly listed company CEOs since 2000 to document statistically and economically significant financial outperformance of LGBT-led firms. Stocks of companies with openly LGBT CEOs generate a monthly alpha of 0.69%-1.08%, robust to portfolio weighting schemes, estimation frequency, multi-factor asset-pricing models, factor multicollinearity,...

Investment Choice in Collectivised Pensions

By John Armstrong & Cristin Buescu Investment choice is a central theme of UK pension policy. This paper shows how a collective pension fund can be managed in a manner that allows individuals to choose how their pension is invested and their schedule of pension payments. The potential benefit to investors of such a fund is quantified on the assumption that they choose to invest optimally. For our indicative choice of individual we find that they would need to invest...

Reporting on a Greener Future

By Maggie Williams As climate change and ESG stewardship become a central part of pension schemes’ investment strategy, identifying suitable performance measures and devising frameworks to report on them has also risen in importance. The Pensions Regulator and Department for Work and Pensions now requires schemes to use the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures framework (TCFD) to report on their portfolios – and from April 2022, large companies in the UK will also be subject to mandatory climate risk reporting, based...