Conflicten en geweld zijn helaas van alle tijden. Zeker in de laatste jaren zijn geopolitieke spanningen aan de orde van de dag, zoals veroorzaakt door ‘America first’, Brexit en de inval van Rusland in de Oekraïne.
Een snelle google search leert dat BlackRock per jaareinde 2021 ongeveer USD 10 triljoen onder beheer heeft. Dit is een 10 met 12 nullen! Een partij als Vanguard heeft USD 7.2 triljoen onder beheer. De vraag is: hoe is het uiteindelijk zo ver gekomen en waar is het allemaal gestart dat partijen als BlackRock en Vanguard zo’n sterke marktpositie hebben. Daarnaast worden de meeste benchmarks geleverd door een aantal grote namen binnen de industrie: MSCI, FTSE Russel en S&P Dow Jones. Hoe hebben deze partijen zoveel macht kunnen grijpen op Wall Street?
I am very honoured and thankful that the VBA Journal invited me to contribute to its special 150th edition. In this article, I will share my personal perspective on the responsible investing phenomenon. I will first look back at the past two decades in which responsible investing transformed from a niche product to a hyped set of investment solution services. I will then highlight several implicit trade-offs and conflicts of interest that materialize in the many manifestations of responsible investing such as divestment, engagement, and ESG-integration strategies.
I had only just started as editor in chief of VBA Journaal when the credit crisis (‘the global financial crisis’) erupted. This event had a huge impact on both my professional life and my personal life. The investment funds that I oversaw were at risk of collapsing, banks were being held afloat with all sorts of buoyancy aids and the media were asking me to explain all this. My children, who were still very young at the time, wondered whether cash machines would continue to dispense money and whether their grandparents’ pensions were safe. My own portfolio halved in value. Through robust government intervention, the problems were controlled relatively quickly.
In this article we will reflect on the developments in the field of quant investing and argue that the future looks bright. With decades worth of experience at actively navigating multiple investment cycles we have learned that a long-term winning formula can sometimes feel like riding a rollercoaster in the short run. Due to this cyclical nature quant investing is often more a test of character than a test of intelligence and ‘strong hands’ are a necessary condition for success.
Through the various crises in recent decades, it has become clear that the world is fundamentally uncertain – and not stochastically uncertain. With the new insights based on, among other things, complexity theory, it starts to dawn in science and in practice, that we need a greater diversity of models and tools. From Agent Based Modeling and network theory to premortems and scenario thinking. These will enhance financial risk management practices.
Out with the old
Pension funds around the world are increasingly investing in alternative assets, and the most important of these “alternatives” is real estate. We employ the CEM global pension fund database to shed light on the determinants of pension fund allocation to real estate, both over time and in the cross-section. We find that pension funds’ strategic allocation to real estate – net of return effects – is the result of the historical performance of real estate relative to other asset classes, and that pension funds quickly adjust their actual allocation rate to their strategic allocation decisions.
I was editor-in-chief of VBA Journaal from 2001 until 2008. We had just emerged from a period when most of the articles that we received were written by academics. Quite often, this meant that the content of the magazine and the requirements and interests of our readers were not properly aligned. From 2001 onwards it was mainly authors who actually worked in the financial sector that provided us with articles. In the beginning, this took some effort on our part, but the process became easier as time went on – especially because as editors we actively tried to come up with interesting themes and looked for authors to match.
Fast-speaking Koijen talks about the financial markets with great passion. His main focus is why financial markets fluctuate as much as they do. “If on a given day the market rises or falls, you can usually come up with a few possible reasons. But no one really knows. Even when quarterly figures are published, we have a hard time explaining why share prices go up or down. That is one of the crucial questions that my collaborators and I are asking”, says the professor.
LANGE TERMIJN SMALL-CAP AANDELENPORTEFEUILLE ALS ALTERNATIEF VOOR PRIVATE AANDELEN
Het VBA Journaal sprak voor deze editie met Patrick Kanters, Managing Director Global Real Estate & Infrastructure bij APG Asset Management. Hij is bij APG AM verantwoordelijk voor de beleggingen in “real assets”, het onderwerp van dit nummer. In het geval van APG zijn dit met name beleggingen in vastgoed, infrastructuur maar ook zogenaamde “natural resources”. Deze laatste categorie omvat investeringen in onder meer bosbouw en agrarische grond. Patrick is, naast de real assets tak, ook verantwoordelijk voor private equity. Zijn team opereert vanuit drie kantoren: Amsterdam, New York en Hong Kong.
Voor beleggers in Europa was Bosbouw lange tijd vooral een verhaal van ‘onbekend maakt onbemind’. Gemotiveerd door de duurzame toepassingsmogelijkheden van hout, het behoud van bossen en de natuurlijke CO2-opslag, krijgt Bosbouw nu ook hier meer aandacht. Zeker met ‘Glasgow’ vers in het geheugen. Bomen slaan immers veel CO2 op. Oftewel, er is een ‘carbon sink’, wanneer het materiaal duurzaam wordt toegepast, zoals bij de bouw van huizen of voor meubelen. Ook lopen institutionele investeerders meer warm voor Bosbouwinvesteringen.