Canadian defined benefit plans saw a median return of negative 7.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2020, after enduring a historic period of market volatility and economic turmoil resulting from the global pandemic crisis, according to both the Northern Trust Canada universe and the RBC Investor and Treasury Services universe. Northern Trust Canada […]
OMERS Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, has closed a US$750 million venture capital fund — its largest fund to date. The transatlantic fund is investing in companies related to financial systems, insurance, property, logistics, health and workplace technology in Canada, the U.S. and U.K., as well as Europe. […]
Global institutional investors say they intend to gently reduce their average new capital commitments to real estate in 2020. According to a new report by Institutional Real Estate Inc. and Kingsley Associates, survey respondents said they’re reducing their new spend by an average of 11 per cent this year. Notably, the survey was conducted between Nov. 12, […]
The coronavirus pandemic is hastening certain trends that institutional investors incorporating environmental, social and governance issues have been eyeing for some time. One trend is the democratization of technology, which Catherine Flockhart, a director at Baillie Gifford, says her firm has been positioned for in certain strategies. While many point to the sudden increase in […]
The British Columbia Investment Management Corp. is aligning itself with other global pension investors by signing a new joint letter calling for long-term sustainability to become a more prevalent concern for corporations and asset managers. The letter was co-signed in early March by three institutional investors — Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement Scheme and […]
The University of Toronto Asset Management Corp. has earned a 13 per cent return on its pension portfolio for 2019, and a 12.9 per cent return on its endowment portfolio, net of all fees and expenses. While the 2019 results were strong, and beat the university’s target return of 6.2 per cent, they lagged the […]
The Nova Scotia Teachers’ Pension Plan is bracing for the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on its assets as it reported a 78.2 per cent funded status on a going-concern basis — up from 75.3 per cent at the end of 2018 — and a $1.497-million deficit in its 2019 annual results. “While the plan remains […]
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, alongside Dutch pension fund ASG and asset manager ESR Cayman Ltd., has entered into a new strategic agreement to establish a new development joint venture in South Korea with a total equity allocation of US$1 billion. The joint venture, ESR-KS II, will invest in and develop an industrial and […]
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 […]
Even amid the global chaos created by the coronavirus pandemic, China is too big an economy for institutional investors to ignore. A recent report by Greenwich Associates found the two main drivers for China allocations among institutional investors are diversification (54 per cent) and potential for alpha (31 per cent). But just as markets in Europe […]