The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has made two new appointments to its executive team. Gillian Brown, who joined the pension fund in 1995, is senior managing director of capital markets. Her previous roles at Ontario Teachers’ include equity trader, portfolio manager and managing director of insurance linked, credit and equity products. Read: OTPP posts 3.2% return for first […]
The National Pension Hub is awarding funding to three research projects, focusing on themes like portfolio construction and plan design. The hub, which the Global Risk Institute in Financial Services created in October 2017, is a Canadian centre for pension knowledge and research. One research project, which will be led by Stephen Bonnar, a post-doctoral fellow, and Douglas […]
There’s plenty of evidence that sustainable investing is gaining traction as an important consideration in institutional investors’ strategies and portfolios. Take, for example, the fact that the number of signatories to the United Nations’ principles for responsible investment has steadily increased; regulators in many jurisdictions have mandated that institutional investors explicitly consider their environmental, social […]
In hindsight, everybody would have invested in Apple back when it was a smaller, obscure private company. But as its founder Steve Jobs famously once said in a different context: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” So for investors who can stomach the risk, private companies valued […]
A conversation with Joe Overdevest, portfolio manager at Pyramis Global Advisors After six years as an analyst, Joe Overdevest became a portfolio manager in October 2008. “The first day I took over a portfolio, I had stocks down 15%,” he says. So he bought companies with strong financial positions that would withstand the changing economy, […]
Canadians are playing it safe when it comes to investing.
The past few years have been difficult for DB pension plans in Canada. Continued equity market volatility and, until recently, extremely low interest rates have made financial management of DB plans extremely challenging, especially for those subject to solvency valuations.
Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund is considering changing its portfolio strategy to allow it to buy more domestic equities, according to Reuters.
Manager performance is often monitored by committees over a quarterly or monthly basis, and while investment oversight is a necessary and prudent function of fiduciaries, it can also be dangerous.
As the year begins, it is instructive for pension fund managers and asset allocators to consider various macro risk scenarios that are not base-case predictions but rather relevant considerations for stress testing portfolios. It can be useful to understand how individual asset classes would react under each scenario and the resulting portfolio performance. As part of this exercise, consider the impact on liabilities and whether the risk scenario would induce pension managers to consider a change to asset allocation to suit the new environment.