Achieving Investment Excellence is an essential, practical guide for both new and experienced trustees to help them safeguard performance while remaining faithful to the mission and long-term strategic goals of their (pension) funds, endowments and foundations. As a trustee, you play an essential role in the success of your long-term asset organization. This book provides vital information to enhance your level of knowledge and expertise and gives practical insights into do’s and don’ts.

Drawing on their own extensive expertise in finance, investments and board rooms, authors Kees Koedijk, Alfred Slager and Jaap van Dam offer you a broad-range analysis and a raft of solutions for what to do with your fund and its investments to succeed in achieving the funds’ goals. You’ll learn how to effectively and confidently steer your fund’s portfolio with a thorough understanding of risk concepts, return expectations and key investment tools and benchmarks. With an ability to thoroughly assess the quality of your investment set-up, you will be ready to engage in strategic changes that can yield real, measurable gains for your fund.

Achieving Investment Excellence is peppered with discussion questions, case studies and practical tools you can implement to immediately begin improving board effectiveness and fund performance. Regardless of your fund size, you can realize greater returns, simply by improving your understanding of how the board designs, guides and monitors investment. Embrace the opportunity inherent in the trustee role and begin focusing the investment agenda on what really matters.

Contents 

Chapter 1: The Role of Pension Funds, and the Role of Boards

Chapter 2: Developing Purpose, Mission, Vision and Goals

Chapter 3: Grasping the Investment Essentials

Chapter 4: Investment Beliefs as Guiding Tools

Chapter 5: Designing the Investment Management Process
Chapter 6: Organizing the Investment Function

Chapter 7: Implementing the Investment Strategy

Chapter 8: Building the Investment Portfolio

Chapter 9: Monitoring and Evaluation

Chapter 10: Becoming an Effective Board

Chapter 11: Establishing the Investment Committee

Chapter 12: Managing the Investment Management Organization

Chapter 13: Learning to Decide and to Take Advice

Chapter 14: Achieving Investment Excellence