With a rough 2020 year-to-date, value investing’s recent poor performance follows over a decade of underperformance, leaving many to ask if it’s still relevant, according to a new white paper by Mercer. Between 1927 and 2008, the average annual value premium was 5.5 per cent, but since then results have been lacklustre. In the 2010s, […]
Institutional investors are grappling with the long-term implications of how the coronavirus pandemic will affect demand for various real estate sectors. Many real estate assets will remain under pressure even as establishments across sectors are once again able to welcome customers, says Jeff Olin, president and chief executive officer at Vision Capital Corp., noting that […]
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, in-person visits by institutional investors have been drastically reduced, temporarily short circuiting qualitative due diligence and leading to slightly more reliance on quantitative analysis, says Jeff Schwartz, president of Markov Processes International Inc. Quantitative analysis can help identify red flags and indicate when a deeper dive is required, for example. “That’s […]
The Bank of Canada is holding its key interest rate at 0.25 per cent in response to what it calls the “extremely uncertain” economic outlook from the coronavirus pandemic, and plans to keep it there until the picture improves. In its updated outlook, the bank said Wednesday it expects the economy to contract by 7.8 […]
Statistics Canada says Canadians’ buying patterns changed so much during the coronavirus pandemic that its measure of consumer inflation went a little wobbly. The agency previously reported that year-over-year inflation declined by 0.2 per cent in April, then took a further drop of 0.4 per cent in May as lockdowns put a damper on consumer […]
For years, institutional investors have used absolute return or cash-plus benchmarks to measure infrastructure performance, but it’s time to put these in the past and adopt market-relevant benchmarks based on fair value and representative data, according a new paper by the EDHEC Infrastructure Institute. “From the viewpoint of the state of the art in financial […]
Nearly two million Canadian workers could remain unemployed this year, according to forecasts in the federal government’s long-awaited “fiscal snapshot.” The document released Wednesday details how the Trudeau Liberals see the coronavirus pandemic dragging down the domestic economy and sending the deficit to a historic $343.2 billion. The economic and fiscal report lays out the […]
The Public Sector Pension Investment Board’s special coronavirus emergency relief initiative has raised over $700,000 for various charities. Donations went to supporting four organizations actively involved in coronavirus relief efforts, namely HealthPartners, United Way/Centraide Canada, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Community Foundations of Canada. Through the initiative, which ran from May 12 […]
Many asset classes, including private equity, have been hammered by the coronavirus fallout, but opportunities still exist in the primary middle market for a variety of structural reasons, according to a new report by Capital Dynamics. Specifically, it noted that primary private equity fund managers deploy capital over three to five years, which avoids the […]
The Bank of Canada’s latest review of business and consumer expectations has revealed how widespread uncertainty is muting rehiring and purchasing plans, published days before a federal update gives the Liberals’ outlook for the economy. The central bank’s business outlook survey suggested about half of firms foresee a rebound in their sales within the next […]