Pity the folks at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. They shot the lights out with investment performance last year and the fund is still in the red.

The positions have changed, over the past three years, in the food chain of professional funds management, away from the manager and towards the fiduciary. And it is not just the large fiduciary funds which can benefit from the trend.

While risk for investment portfolios has been well-studied in the light of the financial crisis – if insufficiently before – the notion of long-term risk is still underexplored, according to Roger Urwin.

As incongruous as it sounds, executives at Transocean Ltd – the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon oil rig which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico last year killing 11 people – have been paid bonuses for their improved safety performance.

You have to feel sorry for the investment professionals at large public sector pension funds around the world. They must pay a big price for the transparency of their funds.

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund has outsourced the management of its Spanish equities to one of the country’s top-performing managers.

News this week that the world’s largest hedge fund manager, Man Group, is to take full ownership of Ore Hill Partners Capital Management highlights the under-researched area of event-driven hedge funds.

Members in the HK$365 billion ($46.8 billion) Mandatory Provident Fund, which is expected to triple in size in the next 10 years, have a new comparison tool to help them decide their service provider and investment options.

The latest review of private equity markets around the world by Partners Group shows continued favouritism for the Asia-Pacific growth story but a rising wariness about competitiveness and prices.

The two big decisions for fiduciary investors this year concern interest rates and currencies. But those decisions are relatively easy. What is a lot more difficult is: how do you go about implementing these big-picture decisions at the hands-on level?

Inflation is a big risk for most pension funds around the world. The question is: what do you do about it? The interesting point, though, is if inflation is a ‘fat tail’ risk, maybe it’s already been too widely signalled.

One of the more interesting numbers behind the last Chinese GDP growth headline figure is the proportion of that growth which is due to domestic demand. Fiduciary investors have been getting set for the domestic demand theme in China for some time, of course. Well, it’s here in a big way.