Products August 7, 2013

eVestment Enhances Monitoring Tool

Institutional investment data and analytics provider eVestment has launched a attribution platform for its eVestment Analytics service.
Reported by

Delivered via a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, the new eVestment Attribution serves professionals in the institutional investment market including asset managers, consultants and plan sponsors. For asset managers, the new attribution platform offers a deeper level of competitive analysis while continuing to safeguard sensitive manager-holdings information from competition. For consultants and plan sponsors, the platform offers a more efficient way to use attribution as a natural part of manager selection and monitoring processes.

By using holdings data from the eVestment database, users can eliminate the time-consuming process of soliciting individual manager holdings data, populating a sizable listing of results, and then uploading the data into a stand-alone attribution platform for analysis. Users can evaluate the impact of security, sector and regional decisions, as well as style, timing and activity components, while assessing other quantitative and qualitative information on funds.

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“Attribution is a powerful approach to analysis, but it can be a cumbersome and time consuming one if you have to aggregate the necessary data from multiple sources. With full integration into our database, we’ve simplified the process and made attribution a dynamic feature available to any client type,” said Matt Crisp, eVestment’s COO. “Once you’re logged in, there’s no need to migrate data from other systems.”

More information on eVestment Attribution, including a video, can be found here.

The Markets August 7, 2013

Institutional Investors Have Mixed 2Q

Institutional investors posted mixed returns in Q213, according to the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service (Wilshire TUCS).
Reported by

“The second quarter performance for median plan return types was mixed with a high return of 0.38% for Taft-Hartley defined benefit plans and a low return of -0.75% for large corporate plans,” said Robert J. Waid, managing director, Wilshire Associates. “The median quarterly return for all plans was down for the first time since the second quarter of 2012 coming in at -0.06%.”

Public funds gained 0.24% for the quarter, while endowments and foundations posted a 0.03% return. With most of the asset classes being down for the quarter, most of the performance differences primarily can be attributed to different exposures to the U.S. equity market, noted Waid.

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He added, “Though the Wilshire 5000 closed the quarter with its first losing month since October 2012, it still set 13 more all-time-highs, resulting in a quarterly return of 2.77%, while the median U.S. equity plan return was 2.42%. The Barclays U.S. Aggregate followed up its first quarterly decline since 2006 with a -2.32% return. The median U.S. fixed income plan nearly mirrored that with a performance of -2.28%.”

With international equity falling, all measured plan types again underperformed the simple 60/40 (U.S. equity/U.S. bond) default asset allocation for the quarter, noted Waid.

Wilshire TUCS is a cooperative effort between Wilshire Analytics, the investment technology unit of Wilshire Associates Incorporated (Wilshire), and custodial organizations. Wilshire Associates is an independent global investment consulting and services firm.

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