In a year marked by unpredictability and an unexpected rift between Canada and the U.S., Sophie Leblanc wants to look forward in McGill University’s investment strategy and avoid pitfalls from short-term volatility. “I’m less concerned with short-term volatility,” says the university’s chief investment officer and treasurer. “There has been a lot of short-term volatility and […]
As private market assets become more widely adopted by institutional investors, they open up new, unexpected opportunities. Tom Keenleyside, associate director of investments at Western University, is ready to meet the moment. “We are in the process of scaling up; I think private market investments have become more mainstream among institutional investors. . . . […]
The Community Foundation of Prince Edward Island is selecting Vestcor Inc. as its investment manager. The CFPEI, which was first incorporated in 1993, oversees more than 200 community foundations in Canada representing several endowments, flow-through legacy and agency funds. Read: Vestcor returns 12.2% in 2024, net assets increase to $23.1BN According to its 2024 annual […]
The Calgary Foundation’s transition from a heavy domestic public market asset mix to a diversified portfolio opened the doors to a larger investible universe and minimized volatility, said Jessica Mitchell, an investment associate at the organization, during a session at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2025 Endowment & Foundation Investment Forum. “The questions that we asked […]
In the years following the 2008/09 financial crisis, Dan Langlois realized the allocation strategy for the Calgary Foundation’s endowment portfolio needed a significant adjustment if it planned to meet its annual funding goals. “I knew we needed to do something in terms of increasing the return in the portfolio to preserve the corpus or the […]
Institutional investors face several challenges in proving the value of sustainable investments, said Arijit Banik, treasurer at York University, during a session at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2024 Endowment & Foundation Investment Forum in June. It’s difficult to measure the impact of an investment, even the cleanest ones, with the current measurement framework available to […]
The goals of impact investing can be more easily achieved through private assets, said Martin Bélanger, director of investments at Western University, during a fireside chat at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2024 Endowment & Foundation Investment Forum in June. “We’ve transitioned our private equity portfolio from a fund-to-fund approach to making direct investment in primary […]
The Canadian pension assets under management of the country’s top 40 investment managers increased by 7.7 percentage points over the previous year, from nearly $989 million at June 30, 2022 to more than $1 billion at June 30, 2023, according to the latest report by the Canadian Institutional Investment Network. The CIIN, which is a […]
According to York University’s Arijit Banik, there’s only one way forward for environmental, social and governance standards: it’s time for an evolution. The treasurer responsible for overseeing the university’s endowment fund wants to go beyond simply investing in wind and solar energies to tick a box. Instead, his investment team has pushed towards sustainable infrastructure […]
Jacky Shen suspects he was the oldest intern Simon Fraser University’s treasury department ever had. It was 2007, he was in his early 40s, had just arrived in Canada with his family and was studying for a master’s degree in the university’s wealth management program. As an intern, Shen — now the university’s treasurer and […]