With gas and oil prices reaching new heights last week, panicking both politicians and consumers, we must ask ourselves if this behaviour is typical of commodity prices in every business cycle or if we’re at the threshold of a major economic disaster? In the 1930s, Nicholas Kaldor analyzed commodity prices and their behaviour over the […]
North American institutional investors are catching up to other global regions in their interest in sustainable investing, according to a new survey by FTSE Russell. Nearly half (42 per cent) of North American asset owners surveyed before the coronavirus pandemic said they’re interested in sustainable investing, up from just 17 per cent in 2019. This remains a […]
While real assets have traditionally served institutional investors well during times of economic stress, the ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic are starting to take their toll in some places. In commercial real estate, investors will likely re-evaluate their capital spending for 2020 in pockets like Edmonton and Calgary with the areas hit hard by the […]
With crude oil futures contracts crashing through the floor into negative territory at the beginning of the week, what opportunities are opening up for institutional investors? Panic set in on commodity trading floors on Monday because physical storage options for oil were filling up fast, with much less demand for petrol from consumers due to […]
The world is awash in oil, there’s little demand for it and we’re running out of places to put it. That in a nutshell explains Monday’s strange and unprecedented action in the market for crude oil futures contracts, where traders essentially offered to pay someone else to deal with the oil they were due to […]
When investing in Brazil, what considerations should institutional investors keep in mind? And how can the market fit into a pension portfolio? One issue to watch is pension reform, said Heather Hagerty, a research analyst at Fidelity Investments, during the Canadian Investment Review’s podcast “Pension Passport.” “Brazil is one of only a small number of […]
During the past decade’s bull market, gold has been largely off the radar for institutional investors. But as key bond yields turn negative, among other recessionary signals, chatter about the commodity is heating up. “All precious metals have no correlation to the rest of the marketplace so that tends to be why gold and precious […]
Rising with the growth of smartphones, lithium has been a hot material in the investment world for a few years. And many in the institutional investment space see exposure to lithium as a high-growth opportunity, according to Jay Jacobs, senior vice-president and head of research at Global X Funds. The metal has many uses in developing […]
The OPSEU Pension Trust, together with British private equity firm Three Hills Capital Partners, has invested more than $89 million into ACT Commodities. The Dutch firm specializes in trading commodities related to reducing the use of fossil fuel and emissions of greenhouse gases. “In nine years, we have built the world’s preeminent trading house for […]
It was a bumpy ride for commodity prices between 2014 and 2016, a result of their close correlation to the state of the global economy. In particular, 2015 saw a major downward trend in many of the more frequently traded commodities, such as corn, gold, lead, silver, soy and wheat, with iron ore, natural gas […]