FULL OF WESTERN PROMISE
What will amount to a minor piece of history will be acted out early this month in a Tokyo conference room when 60 Japanese industrial executives sit down for an investment seminar. Top of the agenda: investment performance measurement.
Nothing unusual about that--until you look at the dichotomy between the agenda and the executives' credentials. The course will concentrate on the basics of standard investment performance measurement techniques: those who come to learn include top pension executives from the cream of Japanese industry. It is the first seminar of its kind organised by Japan's influential Pension Fund Association or, probably, anyone else in Japan.
Unbelievably, for most of the participants, it will be their first glimpse of time-weighted performance measurement and other measurement techniques which generations of fund managers in America and Europe have taken for granted.
The seminar is an oblique but powerful tribute to the swathe that nine newly-licensed foreign-owned trust banks have been cutting through Tokyo's financial community. For some people in the financial services community, the foreigners' arrival is the biggest thing to happen since Captain Perry's black ships dropped anchor off Yokohama in the 1850s.