Even before the coronavirus began affecting capital markets, fixed income investors were becoming more risk averse, according to Invesco’s latest survey. Close to half (43 per cent) of investors surveyed in late 2019 said they felt the then economic cycle had a year or less left to run and were adapting their portfolios accordingly. In some cases, this change […]
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is expanding its strategic relationship with Wellington Management Co. to better integrate climate science research into its investments. Wellington and the Ontario Teachers’ are collaborating with the Woods Hole Research Center, a climate-change think tank, with the goal of applying research findings when executing the Ontario Teachers’ investment strategies and […]
The Investment Management Corp. of Ontario reached $70.3 billion in assets under management at the end of 2019, up from $63.3 billion at the end of 2018. In its latest annual report, the organization, which manages assets for certain broader public sector institutions, shared its growth in assets under management, but didn’t report its 2019 investment returns. “It’s important […]
Canadian employer pension plans saw the market value of their assets increase 1.6 per cent in the third quarter of 2019, up from the previous quarter, according to new data from Statistics Canada. The value of assets was also up 7.3 per cent in comparison to the third quarter of 2018. Bonds saw the highest value gain in the […]
The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System posted an 11.9 per cent return for 2019. The net return added $11.5 billion in value to the pension fund, pushing its funded status on a smoothed basis to 97 per cent. The double-digit returns neatly beat the OMERS overall benchmark of 7.5 per cent. “The story in 2019 is that there was […]
Canada’s defined benefit pension plans increased their solvency levels in 2019 and have equity markets to thank, according to Mercer. The Mercer pension health index, which represents the solvency of a hypothetical plan, increased to 112 per cent in the final quarter of the year, up from 105 per cent at the end of the […]
As private equity becomes a more sizeable part of Canadian pension portfolios, the British Columbia Investment Management Corp.’s resources and staffing are growing with it. In April 2016, when Jim Pittman joined the BCI as its senior vice-president of private equity, his group comprised six or seven people. Three and a half years later, the […]
While the fact that past performance is not a guarantee of future results is a familiar refrain, it appears public pension funds’ return expectations do correlate with how they’ve performed in the past. A paper by Aleksandar Andonov, an associate professor of finance at the University of Amsterdam and Joshua Rauh, director of research and […]
For intergenerational investors, such as foreign pension plans ramping up their exposure to alternative assets and leveraging patient capital, it’s worth paying attention to Indonesia’s potential. “If you follow the logic that the country’s going to be the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world . . . then, to me, it’s too big […]
More than half (52 per cent) of institutional investors said they think a political or world event, such as Brexit, will impact portfolio performance over the next 12 months, according to a survey by Schroders. And that number is on the rise. The survey, which polled 650 institutional investors with a combined US$25.4 trillion in […]