- Avoiding the commodities crash fallout
- Danish pension funds ‘do’ have a competi...
- Norwegian investors have high hopes for...
- Danish fund uses chameleonic strategy to...
- Nordic funds take flight to infrastructu...
- Nordic investors reveal a taste for the...
- Danish funds pressured into slashing costs
- In numbers
- What is liability driven investment?
- Fidelity eyes second home in Nordic centre
Aside from the credit crunch, it seems investors have one thing on their minds at the moment: emerging market equities.
In our own quarterly survey (see pages 14-15), which polled funds with some €81bn of assets under management, 70 per cent said they expect emerging market stocks to be a strong investment trend this year with 30 per cent admitting they intend to push more of their money into the asset class.
Indeed, Mats Langensjö, head of Nordic region at Pioneer Investments, is under no illusion as to what pension and insurance funds will be buying: “You want a hot topic for 2008?” he told the magazine. “Easy – emerging markets. I see emerging market stocks making up 10 per cent to 15 per cent of an investor’s equity exposure.”
Our cover feature on pages 25-27 proves that Mr Langensjo might be right.
Not only is Valtion Eläkerahasto (VER), the €12bn pension fund for Finnish state employees, planning to double its exposure to emerging market stocks from 5 per cent to 10 per cent throughout the course of this year but Denmark’s Sampension intends to continue its overweight position to the asset class.
The fund, which has just announced plans to invest in commodities and infrastructure, has one-tenth of its entire equity holdings invested in emerging economies.
Henrik Olejasz Larsen, chief investment officer at the fund, says: “We have an overweight position to emerging markets and will keep that bias going forward. Ten per cent of our stock holdings are tied up in the asset class and that 10 per cent had a significant impact on our performance last year.”
But, while emerging market economies are proving popular, investors are taking some flak for allocating to private equity. On pages 22-23, we find that Denmark’s former prime minister and member of the European parliament, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, has slammed some private equity funds for being too risky, not transparent enough, costly, and harmful to the job market. “Pension schemes have to be sure that the funds they invest in follow ethical guidelines. They have to be demanding instead of naively handing over money,” he says.
Chris Newlands, editor
