Monthly Archives: June 2020

The best way to manage a DB Scheme (Keating & Clacher)

Posted on June 17, 2020 by henry tapper

  This is the third of three blogs co-written by Con Keating and Iain Clacher informing on the current  consultation on the DB funding code of practice, The other articles can be accessed at the bottom of this blog Optimal … Continue reading →

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Managing means knowing what to measure

Posted on June 17, 2020 by henry tapper

  One of the most interesting (and challenging) parts of running a blog is in encouraging and moderating comments. This site gets quite few (real) comments, but sometimes the comments are as insightful as the blogs they comment on. Such … Continue reading →

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Private Equity Laid Bare (by the FT)

Posted on June 16, 2020 by henry tapper

  Yesterday I wrote about Ludovik Phalippou’s report  “An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & The Billionaire Factory”. My interest had been prompted by an article of Chris Sier’s  I’d re-published on my blog. It showed that 2/3 of the … Continue reading →

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Economies of scale: Chris Sier asks “do they exist?”

Posted on June 16, 2020 by henry tapper

Does size matter? Many fund products come with tiered fee structures, leading to the mantra that the larger the mandate, the lower the unit cost.   As a consequence, there is a belief that the larger the pension scheme, the … Continue reading →

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DC challenges the Private Equity billionaires

Posted on June 15, 2020 by henry tapper

Robin Powell (the evidenced based investor) makes a bold claim. Ludovic Phalippou is a hero.   Who is Phalippou? Ludovic Phalippou is an economist who has written a paper detailing the workings of the Private Equity industry and how it … Continue reading →

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Segregated mandates – a club for large pension schemes only

Posted on June 15, 2020 by henry tapper

With a few exceptions, most pension schemes do not go overboard with the number of asset management products they use.   Having worked with some super-large, super-complex pooled schemes and fiduciary managers, I can understand at least one reason. Lots … Continue reading →

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“We’re racist , and that’s the way they we like it…”

Posted on June 14, 2020 by henry tapper

“We’re racist, and that’s the way we like it” pic.twitter.com/hKRSerVqzb — M (@wolfxmobz1) June 13, 2020 The prequel It’s a sunny June morning, I had just cycled down the embankment from Blackfriars to turn left over Westminster Bridge. As I … Continue reading →

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Asset allocation analysis reveals UK’s governance weakness (Chris Sier)

Posted on June 14, 2020 by henry tapper

Recently, I was tinkering with the asset allocation data for a large sample of defined benefit pension schemes and ‘accidentally’ came across an interesting, and possibly controversial, story relating to asset allocation. Segmenting the data into five cohorts of increasing … Continue reading →

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Estimating R for the UK using Publicly Available Data (Stuart McDonald)

Posted on June 13, 2020 by henry tapper

  By Stuart McDonald for COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group – Learn. Share. Educate. Influence. Summary The Rate of Reproduction Key to understanding the spread of a virus is the reproductive rate “R”. This rate varies over time so we refer … Continue reading →

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If you think you know your costs, you could be wrong

Posted on June 13, 2020 by henry tapper

This is the third of Dr Chris Sier’s insights into cost transparency and it gets right to the heart of the issue: just how much of a pension schemes total costs were previously unknown?   ‘You can’t manage what you … Continue reading →

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