- What is liability driven investment?
- Nordic funds take flight to infrastructu...
- Avoiding the commodities crash fallout
- Nordic investors reveal a taste for the...
- Danish fund uses chameleonic strategy to...
- New blood keeps wind in AP1’s sails
- The Latin America hedge fund opportunity
- Commodities continue to attract business...
- Danish fund branches further into forestry
- Member states stall over EU IORP directive
Welcome to the ninth edition of Nordic Region Pensions & Investments News, Financial Times Business’ dedicated publication for the pension and investment industries in the Nordic countries, which is now two years old.
In this issue we focus on the overseas property market and our cover feature (see page 35) examines investor interest in non-domestic real estate. Investment giant, the €207bn Norwegian Government Pension Fund, helped bring the asset class to the front of people’s minds after announcing that it is eyeing the market, while comparatively smaller funds, such as Länsförsäkringar, the €12.4bn Swedish pension insurance company, have already pencilled in future forays into the arena.
In fact, 50 per cent of the respondents to nrpn’s latest quarterly investment survey (see page 14) say they are making plans to increase their real estate holdings over the next six months. This is despite two-fifths of investors admitting they have concerns with pricing when it comes to overseas property.
“Indirect funds are not cheap any more and once you get an investor like the Norwegian Government Pension Fund saying it intends to diversify into indirect funds then you know pricing will become more of a problem,” Mika Pesonen, chief investment officer of Etera, the €5.6bn mutual pension insurance fund, told nrpn.
But, while investors have issues with non-domestic real estate, our survey found that two-thirds of pension and insurance funds intend to increase their exposure to stocks over the next six months. Respondents predict US stocks will turn in 3.75 per cent over the next six months compared to previous estimates of 1.78 per cent with return expectations for Asian equities more than two percentage points higher than past estimates.
In our interview with ATP’s CIOs Henrik Jepsen and Fredrik Martinsson (see page 28) we examine the €51bn fund’s 18-month project to separate alpha and beta, which is about to conclude, while our two-page Q&A with AP 7’s executive president, Peter Norman, (see page 25) looks at the success of the state fund’s alpha-beta split. “It is important for us to ensure the concept of pure alpha is widespread and I go around the world to conferences and seminars to try and make this a sort of brand name,” Mr Norman told us. “I want the industry to provide us with these types of products as they are the future. But it is not easy to get managers to create them as it leaves them completely naked with no beta to hide behind.”
Chris Newlands, executive editor
